A Film Canon

Black Sunday fuses Universal theatrics with Lewton atmospherics, presenting vampirism as a thirst for sight, and vampiric violation as a gradual leeching of visual modularity from the mise-en-scene which, in turn, is increasingly identified with the demon's mask responsible for channelling witchcraft into the more specifically vampiric register that sets the narrative in motion. This produces a gradual disruption of any notion of mise-en-scene, as the central visual co-ordinates - fireplace, tapestry, painting, curtains - are gradually reduced to so many conduits for the ravenous gaze of the vampire (Barbara Steele) and her converts, leaving their victims with literally nowhere to look, or at least with little more than a collection of still, one-dimensional images to fall through. This wry reinvention of theatrical horror may explain Bava's striking reinvention of mentor Tourneur's trademark vision of inky, claustrophobic passage as a series of exquisite pans and tracks towards total darkness; or, rather, towards the moment between frames, tentatively identified as the most tangible trace of the vampires' destructive sight-lines, which defy any more direct apprehension. As a result, Bava's most innovative moments ultimately cluster around cuts - especially as the film progresses, and they effectively contain the import of previous tracks and pans - most beautifully in the transition from the vampire's re-emerging eyeballs to a short pan out of the mouth of a tuba, these sight-lines tending to be equated with an extra-sensory rumble best figured in terms of a barely tangible-audible sound-vibration. Ultimately, it is these sight-lines, and the crumbling, heavily made-up faces of the vampires themselves, that take on the architectural burden of the mise-en-scene, conceiving each new victim as a living gargoyle, and sculpting the gaze to a similarly hyperbolic extent as Fisher's Dracula, while drawing a more nuanced comparison with cinematic spectatorship, and the phenomenology of 'inhabiting' a succession of still images.