Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960)

 Horror in the older days was all about atmosphere and not gore or scare that makes you lose your sleep for a fucking week afterwards. I never enjoyed to be brutalized by horror movies, that's why most contemporary horror films are not my cup of tee. I belong to the old days. 60s, 70s and 80s are my time. Black Sunday by Mario Bava is a movie that walks like a breath of poisonous and destructive air. The fog, the night, the coach, the castle, the people. All of them walk a road that is most mesmerizing in a way that you feel that you are living in a fairy tale as long as the film runs. A fairy tale that instead of princesses and fairies, has vampires who rise from their grave, bats, coffins, gloomy atmosphere and genuine scare. The flavor that the great Italian director put in his movie is so damn penetrating that you're left without words with eyes stuck to the screen waiting eagerly for the next old school shock scene. And that shock doesn't derive from backets of blood, but from things that live and lurk in the fucking darkness. 

Black Sunday is a movie that lives and breathes inside you after the film finishes. It has that strange agenda where scenes and images from the movie pop up in your brain like ads on the internet and make you shiver like a child that was taken out of the pool on a winter day. Black Sunday is old, but it was old even the day it was shot. It has that ancient, foggy, dusty smell all over that movie. It begins from the fire that is burning in that fireplace of that huge and scary castle and ends up in the tomb where the vampire was buried in the opening scene. I can easily say that this movie is for people who drink their whiskey malt. It's for people with long cigars, that enjoy the fireplace on a cold winter night. It's for people who know the word "finesse" like they know their name. Black Sunday is a movie that will live forever, because it wasn't made in 1960, but it was forged in the same place that the one ring from Lord Of The Rings was forged. Its power is endless.