Curti stated that contemporary Italian film critics "ravaged" Black Sunday, although some noted its cinematography. In France, Fereydoun Hoveida of Cahiers du Cinéma praised the film for the extreme mobility of its camera movements, and the way Bava's visual style created a fantastical and poetic dimension; he declared Bava to be an immediate film auteur with "the soul of a painter". Jean-Paul Torok of Positif also praised the film; Steele was featured on the cover of the magazine's July 1961 issue. On its release in the United Kingdom, Tom Milne of the Monthly Film Bulletin declared that Black Sunday was "One of Bava's best films, with a fluid visual style and a narrative grip that only weakens towards the end. Some chilling moments of both beauty and terror, he has never surpassed." In his view, the English version of the film was "devastated" by the dubbing, and felt the sound belonged, "not just to a different film, but to a different world from the near-hysterical images on screen".
