picture cameras were in those days— by the smoothness of the radical camera movement that reveals the ravaged face of Prince Vajda, so I screened the picture for my friend Michael Lennick, a professional spe- cial effects designer of more than twenty-five years experience. Michael immediately understood how the shot was done, and described to me how the camera had been mounted on a pivot platform locked down in- side a rig of two concentric steel rings, separated by a system of wheels. Such a contraption, he ex- plained, would allow the camera to drop forward on the guides of one ring, then spin 180º onto the other,
turning the upside-down close-up of Prince Vajda’s ravaged face rightside- up. He also pointed out that Black Sunday was making use of this tech- nology more than two decades be- fore Freddie Francis’ camera team innovated such a rig for the Dino De Laurentiis production of Dune in 1984. Great. The only problem is— according to the actor involved in the shot—this was not how it was done. “Actually, it was faked in post-pro- duction,” reveals Ivo Garrani. “Bava never moved the camera in that shot. Instead, he created the illusion of ro- tation with the camera truca.” In other words, the frame was locked down and optically spun until the ravaged face
of Prince Vajda was right-side up onscreen.
One hesitates to challenge the word of such an important witness, but a recently surfaced production photo documenting the filming of this shot shows Ubaldo Terzano manning a cus- tomized 35 mm camera, whose modi- fications were the work of Eugenio Bava. The camera appears to be mounted between two planks of wood, with the lens encircled by a steel ring; a rear system of radiating handlebars look capable of rotating the camera a full 180° in a single spin. Evidently the camera moved so little that Garrani was deceived into thinking the shot was achieved optically.
KATIA and Constantine (Enrico Olivieri) discover the ravaged body of their dead father.
Garrani also says that the shot of the Prince roasting to death in the family hearth—which other special effects men have suggested to me was done by filming the flames through an angled piece of glass cap- turing Garrani’s reflection—was also done with the truca, which married the separate elements of himself and the fire. For the actual shots of the Prince’s head melting and charring in the flames, a wax head with a mechanized interior was substituted, so that the head could continue to
