High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Black Sunday is a 1977 American thriller film directed by John Frankenheimer and based on the novel by Thomas Harris. The film starred Robert Shaw, Bruce Dern, and Marthe Keller and was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Motion Picture in 1978. The inspiration of the story came from the Munich massacre, a Black September attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics.