Review of Black Sunday (1960) by Camden N — 12 May 2009

In the grand tradition of Italian horror, there's not a whole lot of weight to the story (though there's a lot of interesting stuff going on--courtesy of Nikolai Gogol) or characters or anything, but Bava's execution is a real cinematic treat, with some astoundingly great black and white cinematography, and a lot of sequences that are just shot and cut to horror-movie perfection, resulting in a movie that is always atmospheric and creepy and often genuinely terrifying (the opening scene, and a number of sequences in the second half especially).

The acting (even more so, I'm assuming, in the American dub) may be B-movie-bad, but the design, the photography, and the editing are all decidedly A-list--and it's that combination of camp and virtuosity that makes Italian horror great.