October Edition #29: BLACK SABBATH

Director: Mario Bava
Screenplay: Mario Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua, Marcello Fondato
Starring: Boris Karloff, Jacqueline Pierreux, Michele Mercier, Mark Damon
Release Date: 1963


Today’s SIHS entry is another film by Italian genre maestro Mario Bava. The horror anthology BLACK SABBATH collects a trio of terrifying tales introduced by horror icon Boris Karloff, dealing with such nefarious subjects as vengeful spirits, murderous exes, and undead fiends. Just like in PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES these gothic nightmares are brought to life via ultra-stylized lighting, oppressive atmosphere and various other means of low-budget trickery.

Careful! She's not quite dead yet!

The first story, titled “A Drop Of Water”, tells a very simple tale of greed and ghostly vengeance. It concerns a young nurse named Helen who is called to the apartment of a medium who has just died to prepare the body for burial. While dressing the corpse, whose face is frozen in a snarling rictus of horror she spots a large ring on the deceased woman’s finger and snatches it up for herself. However she very quickly discovers that nothing comes without a price as when she returns to her apartment she is taunted by a pesky fly buzzing around her head and the persistent sound of dripping water, not unlike the water heard dripping from the dead psychic’s bedpan. Bava builds tension wonderfully in this sequence using inventive lighting techniques and deep silences punctuated by sudden outbursts of demonic sonic assaults, and draws the viewer into Helen’s increasingly unbalanced psyche through the use of a rhythmically pulsating neon sign constantly blinking outside of her window, leaving you constantly on edge waiting for something to jump out and grab her as the lights blink back on. This is an excellently creepy sequence that showcases all of Bava’s skills behind the camera at their peak. I also suspect that director Sam Raimi was secretly influenced by this story when helming his most recent horror film, DRAG ME TO HELL, which featured similar story beats including a fly that torments that film’s heroine as well as the ungodly disturbing corpse of  a curse-happy gypsy woman that shows up in the damnedest places.

Incredible scenes of woman-on-phone action, boring you like never before!

The next sequence, “The Telephone” is an unfortunately mundane, blasé affair in which a call girl named Rosie returns to her apartment one night and is tormented by a voyeuristic night caller who can see her every move and promises to cause her great bodily harm. Though brief, this story is a true endurance test, featuring none of the eerie mood or suspenseful turns of the knife as the previous segment. The caller quickly reveals himself to be Rosie’s deceased former lover, Frank, whom she turned in to the police for an undisclosed crime. After doing some research I discovered that this segment was heavily edited by the film’s stateside distributor, American International Pictures, drastically altering the thematic content of the material. Swaths of dialogue and the very backbone of the plot were thrown out and hastily cobbled together in order to change what was the story of an angry exes’ revenge plot into an angry ghosts’ revenge plot. While I have been told that the Italian cut of this story is a thousand times better, as it stands in the version I’ve seen this segment is a total clunker.

If you play your cards right, ladies, he'll show you his rape-cave.

The third and final segment, “The Wurdalak”, follows the young Count Vladimir Durfe (Damon) as he witnesses the tragic plight of a Russian family whose beloved father Gorca (Karloff) has been transformed into the dreadful Wurdalak, which is basically the Russian version of a vampire. While traveling the countryside Vladimir discovers a corpse that has been beheaded and stabbed through the heart with a dagger. He brings the corpse with him to a rural cottage, where he meets Gorca’s family, who explain to Vladimir that their patriarch went into the wilderness several days prior with the intention of slaying the bloodthirsty Wurdalak. However, that was five days ago, and they now fear that their father has become the very thing he set out to destroy. These fears turn out to be well-founded as Gorca returns and, playing off of their doubts as to his true nature, methodically picks them off one by one, starting with his young grandson, engaging in a horrific game of emotional vampirism in order to ensure he claims his entire family for the night. This segment is much stronger both visually and thematically than “The Telephone”, going a long way towards rectifying the massive misstep of that storyline by returning to the amazing visuals and production design Bava showed a knack for in “A Drop Of Water”. The story is fairly predictable, but the atmosphere is palpably eerie, helped along by some truly hair-raising visuals of the newly undead beckoning to their intended victims, and of course the gravelly-voiced Karloff delivering a ghoulishly grim performance.

Each story is preceded by a visually frivolous introduction from Karloff who hams his way through some truly corny dialogue, but does so in a winking and fun-loving way that only he could pull of. All in all I thought this was a neat little movie that, aside from the muddled nature of the second segment,  was a fun little diversion with enough scenes of skin-crawling tension and creepy atmosphere to garner a recommendation.

My Rating:
7/10