I'm so sorry: I know last week I promised Zorro, and I had the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks movie all cued up and ready to go. But there was a full moon out, and Mario Bava's "Black Sunday" had just showed up in the mail, and I was all excited from having recently watched "Black Sabbath" for the Final Girl Film Club — anyway, one thing led to another. Bava's film provides witches AND vampires, thank you, plus exploding coffins, swooping bats, walking corpses, terrified milkmaids and all the gorgeous black-and-white visuals you could want. It's perfect for a chilly full-moon night.

We open with a prologue in the 1600s, where Moldavian witch Asa (Barbara Steele) is being sentenced to death by her own brother for sorcery. Because she is so very evil, she has to be branded with the mark of Satan, then killed with a spiked mask to the face, and THEN burned at the stake. The Moldavians do not mess around and neither does Bava. It's a gruesome opener. Asa is not the falsely accused variety of witch — before taking the spiky mask, she snarls out a curse on her brother and his descendants. A rainstorm prevents the witch-burning mob from setting fire to her body, so she's buried in the family crypt, still in the spiky mask.

Two centuries later, it's a more enlightened age. A pair of doctors (John Richardson and Andrea Checchi) are riding through the Moldavian wilderness on their way to a medical conference. How professional! Their carriage driver is reluctant to take a shortcut through the forest because of local superstition about a witch, but the doctors just laugh this off. But that's before their carriage loses a wheel — and before they decide to explore an old tomb nearby, and find a woman's perfectly preserved corpse inside, and before they meet the beautiful and mysterious local princess, Katia (also Steele), walking her dogs nearby. Has an ancient curse been revived? Will evil walk again? Cue howling dogs!

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