Viy
In 1966, two Moscow film students pitched a horror feature based on a classic Slavic witch tale, Nikolai Gogol’s Viy (1833). The khudsovety (artistic committees) that evaluated film proposals in the USSR scowled at the genre as catering to base instincts and superstition.
Black Sabbath
Mario Bava was a living embodiment of Italian genre cinema, working credited and uncredited on nearly a hundred films.