Black Sunday

The Coolidge Corner's midnight series of Italian horror movies begins, as it should, with ex-cinematographer Mario Bava's ambient, sick-Sabbath classic -- 40 years old next year -- about a devil-worshipping witch who won't die. Instead, she comes back each several hundred years or so to wreak Satanic havoc on the good citizenry of Moldavia, and on the dour inhabitants of a moldy castle. The plot creaks, the script is dumb, and the actors are third-rate, but who cares? There's gothic atmosphere galore, and the heinous witch and a look-alike princess are both played by supercult British actress Barbara Steele. With her elongated dark eyebrows, skeletal bone structure, haughty nostrils, Edgar Allan Poe snowy bosom, and Addams Family jet-black hair, Steele is a trip and a treat, a Bettie Page from the crypt.

-- Gerald Peary