Reading the Early Modern Witch: Horror Films of the 1960s and 1970s

Abstract

In the first scene of Mario Bava’s classic horror film Black Sunday (1960), the seventeenth-century Moldavian witch Asa faces execution by a group of hooded men. Though most of the film takes place centuries later, this scene from the early modern period is a necessary prelude to the film’s main action. Flames fill the opening frames, and the camera pans slowly to reveal the terrified yet beautiful Asa bound to an upright wooden platform, near the dead body of a former lover. The Grand Inquisitor—also, as it happens, Asa’s brother—pronounces sentence, condemning her for the many evil deeds she has committed “to satisfy her monstrous love.” The instrument of her death is a metal “mask of Satan” with long sharp stakes inside, to be hammered on to her face by a hooded executioner. As the executioner approaches, she curses her brother and his house, threatening to live on in the blood of his sons and the sons of his sons: “You will never escape my hunger nor that of Satan.”