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When a guy not even twenty like me, with the first hints of a beard and long unruly hair, watches a Mario Bava film, he must try to forget all those crappy horror films he has seen for years in the late-night slots on Italy’s Italia1, all those clichéd scenes, gratuitous bloodbaths, the silly acting of all those blonde girls with big chests and their boyfriend who goes off into the woods to always get slaughtered...
When someone like me watches a Mario Bava film, he must practically forget all the horror films he’s seen because in some way or another they owe a debt to the master from Sanremo; if someone were to watch a Mario Bava film thinking, "Well, yeah, let me watch this vintage film, because I have nothing else to do tonight," they would realize that they've already seen the film, those worn-out scenes, they have already seen in dozens of other films of the genre, those lights, those atmospheres. For this reason, I tried to reset my cinematic memory before watching this work, and by watching it with total cinematic virginity, I tried to capture the emotions that a young person like me could have felt in 1960 when this immortal masterpiece was released in theaters.
Very briefly, the plot tells of a witch, Asa, who is condemned to death in a rather singular manner: she must wear the Mask of the Demon, a spiked metal plate, designed to cause excruciating pain to anyone wearing it; naturally, death does not come from this but from an executioner who with a mallet shatters the skull of the witch wearing the mask. Two centuries later, two doctors en route to a congress, due to an accident, are forced to stop in the village of the crime, learning about the descendants, or rather, the descendant of the witch Asa, Katia (a splendid Barbara Steele, who also plays the roles of the witch in the film). Due to a singular series of events, the witch comes back to life (since a storm prevented her from being burned at the stake, the malevolent’s body was buried in the family tomb) because of some drops of blood that accidentally fell on the corpse, now putrefied after two centuries. From this point onward, I will not reveal anything more as the web of events would be hard to summarize.
The suspense and dramatic crescendo immersed in the dense atmosphere are masterful, the study conducted by Bava on the lights and shadows is indescribable: to be remembered as one of the most beautiful moments in cinema in general, the scene where the witch takes over Katia’s vitality making her age prematurely (the aging scenes are extraordinary).
Other merits of the film then, are the grotesqueness of the violent scenes, and the sadistic cruelty whereby the viewer is spared nothing: yes, while then in traditional horror (still very chaste) violent and macabre scenes were only hinted at and left to the viewer’s imagination, here Mario Bava decided to show us everything, creating a tension and fear that could not be found in the films of that era. In this sense, I would mention the scenes where the witch is branded with a hot iron, or the head of a poor man burning inside the fireplace with the mouth still moving almost to underscore the realism of certain scenes, or the putrefied skeleton hiding beneath the beautiful body of the wicked witch, or again, the horrible wounds left by the mask on Steele’s face.
Lastly, I want to highlight the disturbing, terribly dark, and gothic settings, almost baroque despite the black and white of the film, the photography, perfect, as only a master craftsman can do: to give you an idea, this film, like other future films by Bava, could easily be associated with early musical experiences by Antonius Rex, with Jacula, music that, as he declared, could easily link with Bava-style horror concepts.
The Mask of the Demon is the first true Italian horror because Riccardo Freda’s "I Vampiri" from 1957 (in which Bava actively participated) is still steeped in a drama that in a true horror film is abandoned for more dynamic solutions. It's very much the case to say that we are facing another precursor of the modern horror era, the work of a director whose talent is now recognized, but at the time, perhaps precisely because of his ideas, not avant-garde, but absolutely ahead of its time, was ignored.
Happy Easter to everyone
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