La maschera del demonio premiered in Rome in August 1960, shortly after the Italian horror film—dormant since the commercial failure of I vampiri— had been revived by another quickie inspired by the success of Dracula il vampiro: L’amante del vampiro/The Vampire and the Ballerina. Written by Ernesto Gastaldi and directed by Renato Polselli, L’amante del vampiro proved only a moderate success. Bava’s directorial debut earned even more—an estimated 140 million lire [$87,000]—but this was probably little more than a break-even figure; if its earnings had ended there, the en- deavor would hardly have been worth the bother. In retrospect, it is inter- esting to note that both of these films were signed with their directors’ own Italian names, not with English pseud- onyms, which may have been the very thing that prevented them from achieving popularity in Rome as they would elsewhere around the world. When La maschera del demonio was sold to other European coun- tries, it received plaudits far in ex- cess of its homeland reception. It was particularly well-received in France, where the respected magazine Positif acknowledged the film’s importance by putting Barbara Steele’s Princess Katia, flanked by her two hounds, on the front cover of their July 1961 edition. And when it was released in the United States by American International Pictures—under the title Black Sunday—it became an im- mediate hit with genre fans, who praised it as a perfect hybrid of clas- sic and contemporary horror cinema. As mentioned earlier, Samuel Z.
Arkoff and his partner James H. Nicholson began acquiring Italian films for AIP in 1959, with the help of Fulvio Lucisano, a Roman talent agent with a few modest production credits to his name. Sword-and-sandal pic- tures were inexpensive to acquire and performed well in the wake of Her- cules, so Arkoff and Nicholson began to pick up every halfway-decent, ex- ploitable picture Lucisano could find
PRINCESS KATIA’s first appearance, an image copied by numerous horror film directors from Rafael Baledón to Jean Rollin.