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.”
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Historians consider the idea of the demonic pact, the black Sabbath, and the coven to be the special contribution of late medieval and early modern European writers to witch beliefs. See, among others, Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, 3rd ed. (Harlow, England: Pearson Longman, 2006), 51–61.
See Ronald Hutton, Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 241–71.
See, for example, Marion Gibson’s discussion of American witch films in Witchcraft Myths in American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2007).
Cf. Creed, 73. For other studies of the witch in horror films, see Sharon Russell, “The Witch in Film: Myth and Reality”, in Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), 63–71
Leon Hunt, “Necromancy in the UK: Witchcraft and the Occult in British Horror”, in British Horror Cinema, ed. Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 82–98.
Nikolas Schreck, The Satanic Screen: An Illustrated Guide To the Devil in Cinema (London: Creation Books, 2001), 111.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2010 Greg Colón Semenza
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Willis, D. (2010). Reading the Early Modern Witch: Horror Films of the 1960s and 1970s. In: Semenza, G.C. (eds) The English Renaissance in Popular Culture. Reproducing Shakespeare: New Studies in Adaptation and Appropriation. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106444_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230106444_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-28648-5
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10644-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)