Asa drains Katia of her youth. A cleaver-wielding bridal designer murders various young brides-to-be in an attempt to unlock a repressed childhood trauma concerning the death of his mother.
A vengeful witch and her fiendish servant return from the grave and begin a bloody campaign to possess the body of the witch's beautiful look-alike descendant, with only the girl's brother and a handsome doctor standing in her way. Two hundred years later, Professor Thomas Kruvajan and his assistant, Dr. Andre Gorobec, are going to a congress in Russia and they accidentally find the tomb. Realizing he is now one of the undead, they kill him by ramming a small piece of wood through one of his eye sockets. A tourist spends the night in a derelict Spanish villa seemingly held in the supernatural grip of an eccentric butler, who resembles a depiction of the Devil she had seen on an ancient fresco. Javutich leads Kruvajan to Asa's crypt.
With bloody scenes featuring a wooden stake being rammed into a vampire's eyeball (Bava's variation on the more traditional stake through the heart), a metal mask hammered into a beautiful woman's face, and other mayhem—the film was "far more graphic in its depiction of murder and death than audiences had previously seen. Interviewed in the documentary "Method and Madness: Visualizing 'Dracula'",
Puzzled to hear that Kruvajan abandoned his patient shortly before he died, Gorobec questions a little girl who saw Javutich take Kruvajan to the castle. A Carpathian village is haunted by the ghost of a murderous little girl, prompting a coroner and a medical student to uncover her secrets while a witch attempts to protect the villagers. An American expatriate in Rome witnesses an attempted murder. The screenplay is hackneyed ,the story has been told told and told again...Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends.
Returning outside, Kruvajan and Gorobec meet Katia Vajda.
She identifies Kruvajan's escort with a painting of Javutich. Horror Black Sunday (Italian: La maschera del demonio), also known as The Mask of Satan and Revenge of the Vampire in the UK, is a 1960 Italian gothic horror film directed by Mario Bava from a screenplay by Ennio de Concini and Mario Serandrei (with uncredited contributions by Bava, Marcello Coscia and Dino Di Palma), and starring Barbara Steele, John Richardson, Arturo Dominici and Ivo Garrani. In the Seventeenth Century, in Maldavia, Princess Asa Vajda and her lover Javutich (Arturo Dominici) are killed by the local population, accused of witchcraft. In 1961 it was distributed in the US, France, Japan, Mexico, and West Germany. Meanwhile, Katia is threatened by the witch, who wants to use her body to live again.
Dr. Thomas breaks the cross, releasing the evil witch.
"Upon its theatrical release in the United States, critics generally responded with enthusiasm to Bava's film, many of whom recognized the director as a potential master of the horror When released in the US during 1961, the film was a commercial success for AIP, becoming the distributor's greatest financial success to that time.Coppolla, Roman. Horror Javutich throws Constantine into a death pit and takes Katia to Asa. Bava reportedly found Steele difficult to work with. He then removes Asa's death mask, revealing a partially preserved corpse.
According to Bava, the actress "was somewhat irrational, afraid of Italians. The film was then seen in Sweden (1963) and Finland (1964). In 1962 it was shown for the first time in Austria and Denmark. She contacts Javutich telepathically.