Bitches with a 'W'.

For the next two weeks BAM is showing an interesting festival called Witches' Brew that features movies about our favorite necromancers. Highlights include The Blair Witch Project (1999), Suspiria (1977), The Wicker Man (1973), and Bell, Book and Candle (1958). There are also some '90's witch movies that have gained cult status for being exceedingly ridiculous- but I'd rather watch all 8 seasons of Bewitched than ten minutes of Hocus Pocus (1993).

One witch movie in particular holds a very dark and terrified place in my heart. When I was a kid, KSHB-TV Channel 41 out of Kansas City had a latenight classic horror movie show called "Creature Feature". Hosted by tongue-in-undead-cheek Crematia Mortem (Roberta Solomon), the show introduced me and my siblings to the world of cheesy horror movies like The Blob (1958), The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), and Scars of Dracula (1970). While we found ourselves laughing at most of the movies rather than hiding under the blankets, one movie haunted my young mind.

Black Sunday (1960) is an Italian horror movie directed by genre maestro Mario Bava that was originally called The Mask of Satan. It was the mask that really got under my skin- mainly because the flashbacks to the witch-burnings of the Middle Ages showed condemned witches not only burned at the stake- but masks with big spikes in the inside were hammered onto their heads. It sounded like terrible torture for people who I guess deserved it- but I'd heard that sometimes the good Christian folk of the Middle Ages burned people at the stake for crimes as awful as being left-handed. I was left-handed. And that mask looked very uncomfortable.

Fast forward to the 19th Century when lovely Katia Vajda (scream queen Barbara Steele) comes back to her ancestral home to find out that she is the reincarnation of her witch-y ancestor. The proof is in the painting hanging in the castle showing that the two look exactly alike... well except for the big puncture wounds in her ancestor's face from having a mask pounded onto her grill. There's a creepy, maze-filled castle, a zombie brother who rides around in a ghostly carriage, and Barbara Steele with pits in her face that would discourage the best Proactiv Formula.

I can't explain why this movie terrified me. Maybe it was the extreme hatred of a group of people. Burning alive wasn't enough. They had to hammer masks onto their faces. Who does that?! Maybe it was seeing those witches rise from the grave, yank those masks off their faces and work really hard to punish descendants for crimes of the past.

Maybe it was the creepy zombie brother who looked like Prince Valiant with a bad case of acne. Whatever it was, it scared the bejeesus out of me. The minute I went to sleep that night I immediately plunged into Bava's shadow-filled, badly-dubbed world and could not escape the clammy, grasping hands of those pock-marked witches. I rose screaming from my bed and ran across the house to my parents' room.

But my nightmare only intensified as I ran right into my nude mother getting ready to join my father in the shower. I can't remember ever seeing my mother naked before. I probably had- but my Freudian brain had carefully shielded me from it. Now as I tried to awaken from a terrifying dream with spiky masks and pert-breasted zombies, I stood face-to-face with my naked mother... and I screamed even louder. I ran back to my room and closed the door, shooting under my covers and rolling up into a fetal position. My mother (who thankfully had put on a bathrobe) came in to try and soothe me, but the damage had been done. I would now forever equate the naked female form with witchcraft, spiky masks, and cheap, Italian horror movies.

BAM is showing Black Sunday today. Go see it- but don't go with your mother.