Film · 1960 · Films · 1960s
Black Sunday
Scored from 147 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
Mario Bava's directorial debut is a black-and-white Italian Gothic horror film loosely drawn from Gogol's 'Viy'. In seventeenth-century Moldavia the witch Princess Asa Vajda is condemned by her own brother, who has a spiked iron mask hammered onto her face. Two centuries later, two travelling physicians, Kruvajan and Gorobec, break into her crypt and unwittingly revive her, and Asa sets about draining the life of her identical descendant Katia in order to walk again, assisted by her resurrected servant-lover Javutich. Barbara Steele plays both Asa and Katia, with the decaying Vajda castle and its surrounding countryside as the battleground.
Released in 1960, Black Sunday is a horror film. Its certificate is Not Rated. It was made in Italy, in Italian. It runs 1h 27m.
The calibrated figure is built from 147 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 148 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 339 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1960s films — 1,929 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Black Sunday lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 147.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
