You’ll Need a Vomit Bag for the Torture in ‘Black Sunday’ and ‘Mark of the Devil’

“The producers of the picture you are about to see feel a moral obligation to warn you that it will shock you as no other film ever has. Because it could be very harmful to young and impressionable minds, it is restricted to only those over 14 years of age.”

This come-on, after we’ve already paid for the ticket, opens American International Picture’s U.S. print of Mario Bava’s classic Italian horror film. Kino Lorber has previouly released the uncut edition on Blu-ray, and now they’ve exhumed the American International version for those nostalgics who grew up with it. You’d have to be a nostalgic or completist to find appeal in the film, and you certainly shouldn’t prefer this version to the original (with its sharper image), but it’s still spooky, clammy, and stylish. Those are all thanks to the gliding camera, Gothic sets, Bava’s expressionism, and Barbara Steele’s evil grins and flashing eyes as the dead, grotesquely deformed witch who tries to resurrect by stealing the youth of her descendant-double.

The differences between the original cut and the American International edit are three: it’s a few minutes shorter — no eye-staking, no flesh-burning, less romantic drivel; it uses music by Lex Baxter instead of Roberto Nicolosi; and it’s dubbed in English by Lou Russo’s Titra Studios, a New York company that dubbed lots of foreign product for the US market, so that viewers who grew up watching the stuff on TV can recognize voices from one project to another. The Italians made their own English dub track, which is on the previous uncut version (with onscreen title The Mask of Satan). Not available on either version is the Italian track, which identifies the male villain as the witch’s brother, not her servant.

As per the opening warning, the film opens with one of the most memorably gruesome prologues ever to harm impressionable minds up to 1960, as the accused witch has the iron nails of a “mask of Satan” pounded onto her spurting face with a mallet. It’s a good thing the image is heavily shadowed black and white. This and other violent scenes got the film banned in the UK for years and raised the bar for onscreen torturing of witches, which was raised again by the sourly realistic period drama Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm ).

DVD: Mark of the Devil

Film: Mark of the Devil

Director: Michael Armstrong

Cast: Udo Kier, Herbert Lom

Year: 1970

Rating: R

US DVD release date: 2015-03-17

Distributor: Arrow Films

Rating: 6

Extras rating: N/A

Image: http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/m/markofdevilblu.jpg

In turn, the new bar was vaulted over so far by the German Mark of the Devil that the film was banned and/or heavily censored in many markets. The US poster declared it “the first film rated V for violence”, “positively the most horrifying film ever made”, and “guaranteed to upset your stomach.” If that’s not enough: “Due to the horrifying scenes no one admitted without a vomit bag”. Here, there is truth in puffery, for the story of witchfinders (Udo Kier, Herbert Lom, Reggie Nalder) is a pretext for torture sequences that create a sense of physical and political oppression. It belongs to the ’70s international wave in historical torture movies, often with a WWII setting, from Love Camp 7 to the high-end Salo and Ancient Roman antics of Caligula.

The witch movies are easily readable as essays on the male power structure’s fear and hatred of sexually attractive women, especially the latter film’s smorgasbord of female victims and male authorities — although to give it credit, Mark of the Devil has several male victims. Whether this is merely misogynistic or “about” misogyny is a natural talking point that others have beaten to death, sometimes gouging out its eyes. It’s certainly about power and the all too common extreme expression of it.

Arrow’s blu-ray of Mark of the Devil has excellent interviews (everyone waves a vomit bag) and bonus features on the film’s publicity and on British horror of the ’70s, as well as a commentary track where director Michael Armstrong is interviewed about, among other things, his clashes with producer Adrien Hoven.