Though the fifties are best remembered as an art-house golden age in Italian cinema, even then the work of Federico Fellini and Vittorio De Sica coexisted with peplum, a genre of popular, cheaply made sword-and-sandal movies. Bava inaugurated the Italian gothic-horror subgenre in 1960 with Black Sunday, a gorgeously shot, black-and-white tale about a satanic witch executed in seventeenth-century Moldavia who is resurrected two hundred years later to terrorize her young ancestor.
Source: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8605-the-italian-art-of-violence