The hour when Dracula comes

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Movie
German title The hour when Dracula comes
Original title La maschera del demonio
Country of production Italy
original language Italian
Publishing year 1960
length 87 minutes
Age rating FSK 16 (previously 18)
Rod
Director Mario Bava
script Ennio De Concini
Mario Serandrei
production Massimo de Rita
music Roberto Nicolosi
camera Ubaldo Terzano
occupation

Black Sunday (AKA La maschera del demonio ) is in black and white twisted Italian horror film of Mario Bava from the year 1960. It was Bava's first film in which he led solely directed and was mentioned by name as a director, and made the Leading actress Barbara Steele became a cult figure of the horror film of the 1960s. The screenplay by Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei is based on the story Wij by Nikolai Gogol .

action

1630, the young noblewoman Asa and her lover Javutich of a be Inquisition for sorcery indicted. The court, led by Asa's brother, has her branded and sentenced to death at the stake . Before the sentence is carried out, Asa curses her brother and his descendants. Both are hit with metal spiked masks on their faces, causing them to die. A sudden storm then prevents them from being burned. Asa's body is buried in the family crypt, an old castle church, the Javutichs in a remote place in a cemetery, in unconsecrated earth.

200 years later, Professor Krubajan's carriage and his assistant Gorobec were left lying in front of the grave of the witch Asa because of a broken wheel. The doctors visit the crypt. Asa is laid out in a stone coffin with an opening over her face. At the head of the coffin is a large stone cross, the sight of which is supposed to banish the witch. Out of curiosity, Krubajan Asa tears the spiked mask off his face, injuring his hand. Blood drips from the wound into Asa's empty eye sockets. When Krubajan is attacked by a bat, he accidentally smashes the stone cross with his stick. The doctors paid no further attention to the incident. On leaving the crypt, they meet Katia, the daughter of Prince Vaida, who lives nearby, who is walking her dogs. Katia, a descendant of Asa's brother, looks very much like the witch. In the meantime the coachman has repaired the damage and Krubajan and Gorobec continue their journey. They stay for the night in a nearby inn.

Asa awakens to new life through Krubajan's blood and calls Javutich from his grave. Javutich haunts Prince Vaida in his castle, who collapses. Katia sends a servant to Krubajan, but he is murdered on the way there. In his place, Javutich picks up Krubajan and leads him through a secret passage below the property into Asa's crypt. Asa bites Krubajan and turns him into a vampire . Under her command, the professor kills the prince.

In the meantime, Prince Vaida's servant has been found dead and Krubajan is missing. Because the description of the coachman who picked up the professor also applies to Javutich, Gorobec visits Javutich's grave with a priest. They open the coffin in which they find the undead professor. The priest kills the vampire with a wooden stake rammed through his eye. Javutich kidnaps Katia and brings her to Asa's crypt, who wants to fully regain her vitality with Katia's blood. Katia's brother Konstantin kills Javutich, but loses his own life in the process. Gorobec arrives in the crypt, in front of him are two identical-looking women. Then he discovers the crucifix on Katia's neck; when he tries to hold Asa, her open coat reveals a partially decayed, skeletal body. The priest arrives with a group of men from the village. They tie Asa to a ladder and burn her on a stake. While Asa burns, life returns to Katia's body.

background

production

At the production company Galatea, Mario Bava had already stepped in several times for directors who did not complete productions themselves, twice for Riccardo Freda in The Vampire of Notre Dame (1956) and Caltiki, Rätsel des Horens (1959) and for Jacques Tourneur in Die Battle of Marathon (1959). As a credit to his work, Nello Santi offered him his first commission as a director.

Bava decided to use Nikolai Gogol's story Vij (also Wij ) , published in 1835, as a template for a film. In fact, the film has little to do with its literary model, in which a philosophy student is repeatedly haunted by a witch during a wake. Only the witch motif and a few scenes correspond to Gogol's narrative, for example the transformation of the witch from an old to a young woman and the explosion of the coffin lid.

For the double role of the witch Asa and Katia, Bava engaged the then 22-year-old Englishwoman Barbara Steele. The film was made on a budget between late March and early May 1960. The Italian actor Arturo Dominici can be seen in the role of Javutich / Dracula . Dominici's daughter Germana appears as the host's daughter.

Film start

The hour when Dracula arrives celebrated its Italian premiere on August 11, 1960. When US producers Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H. Nicholson of American International Pictures saw the film on a trip to Italy, they secured US distribution rights for US $ 100,000 , more than the budget of the entire film. Roberto Nicolosi's film music has been replaced in the USA by a new soundtrack by AIP's resident composer Les Baxter . On February 15, 1961, the film opened as Black Sunday in American cinemas.

Measured against the time it was made, the film contains explicit depictions of violence. It was therefore completely banned in England until 1968 and in other countries it was only seen in abridged form. Despite these limitations, the film became a box office hit, particularly in France and the United States.

In German cinemas ran Black Sunday on September 29 1961st The FSK had little to complain about in the film relatively, because a number of scenes from the company in the submission had already been removed, and only an adjustment in the opening sequence was cut and the film for 18 years. The video version was even released in 2006 including several scenes not shown in the theatrical version for ages 12 and over.

German dubbed version

Despite the misleading title German distributor, the film has nothing to do with Bram Stoker's fictional character Dracula in common. The name Dracula was included in the title for marketing reasons, the actor Arturo Dominici played, according to the script, the role of Igor Javuto, which was not designed as Dracula. To justify the mention of Dracula in the title, his name is mentioned twice at the beginning of the film in the German version: The narrator refers to "the prince of all vampires, Dracula", and in the inquisition scene the prosecutor expresses the suspicion that Javutich was in truth Be Dracula. These names can only be heard in the German dubbed version.

Aftermath

The hour when Dracula arrives made director Bava and leading actress Steele famous overnight, but also gave both of them an image closely linked to the horror genre, which Steele repeatedly complained about. Although both made numerous horror films in Italy in the 1960s, there was no further collaboration.

Reviews

“[Some scenes] exploit sadism and pain in an exaggerated way. But otherwise the film is a (visually) fantastic finger exercise in baroque horror [...] It is perhaps the best of the many Bava horror films, and exaggeration - not only in terms of design, but also in terms of form and content - is its only major mistake . "

- William K. Everson , classic horror film

“In the hands of an Italian trivial film director, the romantic model by Gogol turns into a naive, sometimes involuntarily funny, but quite entertaining horror spectacle, the photography of which is based on the aesthetics of silent films. Appreciated by some film buffs as a cult film of the genre. "

literature

  • Gerd J. Pohl: A visit to Rome. A conversation with Arturo Dominici. In: The Vincent Price Appreciation Society (Ed.), Journal , Bonn 1988.
  • Wij, the king of the earth spirits. In: Nikolai Gogol, short stories. Dortmund 1984.
  • The Wij. In: Dieter Sturm, Klaus Völker (ed.), Of which vampires and people suckers. Munich 1968.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Tim Lucas: Terror Pioneer , in: Fangoria , # 42, pp. 20-24.
  2. a b c Tim Lucas: Mario Bava - All the Colors of the Dark , Cincinnati 2007.
  3. a b The hour when Dracula arrives in the Internet Movie Database .
  4. a b The hour when Dracula comes. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed November 3, 2017 .  .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  5. Jürgen Kniep: “No youth release!” Film censorship in West Germany 1949–1990 , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2010, p. 171
  6. If you write about the horror film, I will murder you - Interview with Barbara Steele in film no. 9, Velber 1967.
  7. ^ William K. Everson: Classics of the Horror Film , 1974; German horror film classic , Munich 1980.