Satan Brings a Date to the Drive-in: 1960’s “Black Sunday”
“A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place.” Orpheus is a great film. So let’s take for granted that Jean Cocteau’s one-liner justifies plundering ancient Greece. But when it first appeared in 1950, a shrewd and forward-looking Devil was already eyeing Mod celebrants. They would soon come to the surface, as if from saltwater, movie tickets in hand.
By the Sixties new waves were crashing everywhere at such a rough-and-tumble pace that few could surf them. The frisson of La Nouvelle Vague should be appreciated within a tempest of plurality that shook Hollywood, whose producers, trained in the relative stasis of studio-system majesty, were being tossed willy-nilly on the backs of Italian, British and German breakers. And, emerging from this unpredicted deluge of international currents, spawning endlessly exploitive countercurrents, came Barbara Steele, a castaway or, as she herself puts it, “an unwilling immigrant” to the heart of Hollywood-land where she unhappily resides today. Steele remains a prisoner of her proudest memory, Fellini’s Otto e Mezzo, compared to which her horror movies — The Long Hair of Death, An Angel for Satan, Terror Creatures from Beyond the Grave — essentially amount to the gothic flop house of cinema history.
Well, if that’s what the self-tormenting Britisher chooses to believe…
More than six decades have passed since she played an avenging witch in Black Sunday, but no matter how stubbornly Steele refuses to claim her title as Italy’s reigning Scream Queen, the aura of dry ice and stage blood lingers in the cinematic unconscious, trailing her in gory wreaths. Before the opening credits roll, priestly authority figures intone their denunciations of the witch: their patriarchal power seems distinctly unattractive compared to the emotional display from Steele, who, unlike the rest, is acting like a proper Italian. (It’s not personal pain that matters in these moments, but the channeling of a much larger agony.) Final Impenitence finds its voice as the heavens crash around her: “Go ahead," she thunders, “tie me down to the stake, but you will never escape my hunger, nor that of Satan!”
In retrospect, Steele’s single-digit salute seems aimed at every funeral urn in the gothic toy box, her screen-image glowering at lies, illusions and false promises. Melting through the period trappings is an affect that is “Sixties” to the point of hysteria. Motion pictures are the original sin, a violation against the real. And Steele knows it, too. Very rarely do actors display such awareness of the implications of their craft (and its limitless) power to condition us.
She rises and falls on an ethical seesaw, Italy’s crisis of passion, its Celtic conscience. Willfully, defiantly imperfect. Her undead temptress expresses the same hyperbolic agonies as the icons of saints. Were the Italians of 1960 still Catholic enough to register the naive awe that, here and now, leaves this devout atheist with shivers of remorse?
by Daniel Riccuito