Black Sunday

Bava could not afford colour and made the best-looking gothic ever shot.

A witch is executed in seventeenth-century Moldavia by having a spiked bronze mask hammered onto her face. Two hundred years later a doctor's blood revives her.

The opening two minutes are as good as horror photography gets: fog on a crane, a mask, a mallet, and a cut. Bava had been a cinematographer for two decades and had finished several other directors' films uncredited, and this was his official debut at 46.

Barbara Steele plays both the witch and her descendant, and her face became the single most recognisable image in Italian horror. She was dubbed by somebody else, as everybody was.

Banned in Britain until 1968. The American International version is shorter, rescored and dubbed differently, and the Italian cut is the one to find.