Severin Films’ Blu-ray of Lamberto Bava’s The Mask of Satan (1990) is a revelation for fans of Italian Gothic horror, not least because virtually nobody’s ever seen it. The opening scene of The Mask of Satan presents a helicopter dropping off a group of expendable young ninnies to go skiing in the Alps. To Simon Boswell’s pulsing rock score, they swerve and slalom into a cavern or crevasse that suddenly opens beneath them.
The two most important ninnies are tall, handsome Davide (Giovanni Guidelli), who always looks like he’s just been struck in the face with a mackerel, and beautiful Sabina, who breaks her right leg in the fall before it’s magically cured. She’s played by Deborah Caprioglio, who’s using the name Deborah Kinski as a box-office ploy because she’d recently co-starred with Klaus Kinski in a popular film. Davide and Sabina tell each other they’re virgins, a fact significant for this highly Catholic story’s fear of sex.
Davide and Sabina discover a grotesque mask sticking out of a chunk of ice. It turns out to be a death mask covering a mummified woman awaiting rebirth from this frozen womb cave. The mask is removed, of course, and Sabina promptly becomes possessed by the spirit of an executed 17th-century witch named Anibas, which Davide will finally realize is “Sabina” spelled backward.
As a further senseless coincidence, the first names of the other nitwits acrostically spell the same thing. This combination of circumstances must be what Anibas needs to start turning everyone into gibbering maniacs, not that most of them ever seemed far from it.
Then things really get weird. This ice chamber is an annex to a vast underground church with what seems like Russian Orthodox trappings, as presided over by a blind priest (Stanko Molnar) and his white dog. Soon, we get a flashback in which Anibas (Eva Grimaldi) is tied to a stake under the supervision of this same ghostly white priest. While she spits out promises of revenge, she gets the mask spiked to her face with a Thor-like hammer.
Complete with the witch’s POV shot of the approaching mask, this flashback will strike a familiar chord for anyone who knows their Italian Gothic horror. In 1960, Lamberto’s father, Mario Bava, put himself on the map with La Maschera del Demonio, a black and white, richly creepy horror film that soon assumed classic status. Known in English as Black Sunday, the film introduced scream queen Barbara Steele in a dual role as the witch and as her reincarnated descendant, who’s threatened with spiritual possession when, of course, some numbskull removes the mask from its corpse.
In an extra on the disc, Lamberto Bava declares that he hates remakes and refers to his project as “homage” to his father. The Mask of Satan recycles a few elements, such as the mask and the idea of witchy possession, but otherwise, it is quite different from Black Sunday. Two actresses are used instead of a dual role, and Lamberto allows himself a great deal of free-associational freedom and dream logic as the characters keep waking up. For example, at one point, he presents Anibas as a blue-faced, snake-haired Medusa for no reason other than wicked grooviness. If you were a witch who could manifest as a blue Medusa, wouldn’t you?
He also loves to showcase simple effects and goes wild with Steadicam shots. As he explains, the delirious Steadicam shots are combined with a crane so that certain shots spin dizzily across space, like in a Sam Raimi movie. The so-called story of The Mask of Satan becomes a loose framework for ideas to showcase that camera and the freaky makeup effects of Sergio Stivaletti. At one point, Anibas is pictured with giant chicken or frog legs, perhaps about the chicken-legged house of Baba Yaga, the Russian folklore witch. It makes no sense whatever, but it’s startling.
Lamberto Bava tells the project’s origin but may not have all the facts. He states that his homage was made as an Italian television movie to be shown as one of six films in an international anthology of witchy stories. In Bava’s telling, the other films were never made, his movie got shelved, and The Mask of Satan was hardly seen. It was certainly not in good shape until the negative was recently rediscovered.
According to IMDB, Bava may not be aware that all six episodes were made and broadcast on Spanish television in 1992 under the name Sabbath. Maybe that’s a matter of further excavation. It seems also that The Mask of Satan has been released, perhaps unofficially, as Demons 5: The Devil’s Veil. Adding to the confusion is that while both Mario and Lamberto Bava’s films use the same Italian title, La Maschera del Demonio, they take different titles in English. Mario’s is Black Sunday, and Lamberto’s is The Mask of Satan.
Another source of confusion is that both films claim to be based on Nikolai Gogol’s classic horror tale Viy (1835), which is about a student who keeps watch over the corpse of a witch who tries to possess him. Very little of Gogol’s story pertains to either Bava film. If you’d like a reasonable film version of Gogol, you should track down a spooky 1967 Russian film called Viy. This is another classic of Gothic horror cinema, and it’s credited to directors Konstantin Yershov and Georgi Kropachyov, with marvelous effects by the renowned Aleksandr Ptushko.
I subscribe to an unprovable theory on the provenance of Mario Bava’s plot about the reincarnated witch burned at the stake. That idea has nothing to do with Gogol, but it’s got something to do with Thorne Smith, the American writer of popular, mildly bawdy comic-fantasy novels that used ghosts, witches, Greek gods, and similar figures as madcap expressions of the id or libido that break the buttoned-down boundaries of middle-class America. Ordinary folks cross paths with fantastical entities, and soon everybody’s running around in their underwear. The most famous example is Topper (1926), a novel that spawned two sequels, three films, and a television series. Topper is a bored and boring everyman who learns to throw off some middle-class shackles when two tipsy ghosts invade his life.
Smith’s final, posthumously published novel was The Passionate Witch (1941). French filmmaker René Clair, who specialized in gossamer comedies, turned it into the Hollywood film I Married a Witch (1942). This film opens with a scene where a lovely Salem witch and her father are burned at the stake, and the witch vows revenge on descendants of the Puritan elder responsible. Fast forward to the present day, and the haplessly prim and proper descendant is bewitched into romance with the irrepressibly reincarnated sorceress. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the direct yet unofficial inspirations for the sitcom Bewitched (1964-72).
American films weren’t distributed in Italy during the War but came out in a postwar flood, and it’s likely Married a Witch gave Mario Bava and his writers a premise for Black Sunday. Instead of a witch and her father, he uses a witch and her lover, and her vengeance becomes serious instead of comedic. Tim Lucas, author of a massive book on Mario Bava, also suspects that Orson Welles’ Macbeth (1948) and Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) had an impact on Black Sunday.
Lamberto Bava’s homage to his father is drenched in Italian Catholic tradition and Gothic influence. Evil is associated with sex, and one reason the other skiers succumb instantly to evil influence is surely that they’re sexually active. One of the skiers is played by Michele Soavi, a director of diabolic religious-themed Gothic horror such as The Sect (La Setta, 1991).
Davide’s virginal status protects him, along with the priest’s making a sign of the cross at his forehead. Her virginity doesn’t protect Sabina, however, either because the reverse-name business dooms her or because beautiful women are natural vessels of evil according to dubious theological gallimaufries. It would make more sense if, as in Black Sunday, she were a reincarnated descendant or atavistic figure, but that’s not so here.
In any case, Sabina’s transformation won’t be complete until she seduces Davide, so having sex out of wedlock (or warlock) will doom everyone. To save himself, he’ll have to perform an entirely different form of penetration that preserves his honor and virtue. And so it goes. Stay away from sex, kids. And skis.
While his father created a tight, atmospheric work of Italian Gothic horror, Lamberto provides more of a scrambled disco-inferno 1980s version of similar traditional ideas, one that delights in unexpected effects, good-looking production design, and frantic nonsense. It can’t be taken seriously and doesn’t intend to be, but it can be enjoyed for a technical imagination much better than its obscurity implies.
[The Mask of Satan, Severin Films trailer]