Black Sabbath (Italian: I tre volti della paura),1963.
Directed by Mario Bava.
Starring Boris Karloff, Jacqueline Pierreux, Michèle Mercier, Lydia Alfonsi, Mark Damon,# and Milo Quesada.
SYNOPSIS:
A three part horror anthology featuring a woman who is terrorised by phone calls from an escaped convict, a nurse who steals a ring from the corpse of a dead spiritualist and a much-loved paterfamilias who might not be entirely what he seems.
An inspiration to many horror filmmakers, fans and creatives – not least Ozzy Osbourne and his former band mates who were inspired to use the film’s name after reading its evocative title on a cinema’s bill – Black Sabbath is a something of a bookmark in supernatural cinema.
Greatly benefitting from a complete audio and video restoration, the film has certainly never looked and sounded clearer. The Technicolor on show stands out brilliantly and in some ways prefigures the route which Italian horror cinema would go down in later years.
Consisting of three very different segments; the giallo style The Telephone, the historic gothic The Wurdalak and the obsessive guilt ghost story The Drop of Water, the film is held together by the surreal and hallucinatory introductions of Boris Karloff. The horror legend, who also acts in The Wurdalak holds a strong and engaging presence in the film.
While the anthology as a whole has much to recommend it , not least the amusing Karloff intros, when viewed as individual stories and referring back to the Italian and American versions further points of intrigue develop. This is certainly the case with The Telephone, to my mind the most interesting of the three.
Inspired by feelings of possessiveness and jealousy, it concerns a young woman haunted by a gangster lover, who may or may not have escaped from prison. In the English dubbed version she is patronised by a former female friend and love rival in the attentions of said gangster Frank.
Any reference to their relationship being anything other than this has been strictly omitted in the Anglo version. However, in the Italian audio version it is clear that they have a history as lovers.
As what must have been something of a shocking love triangle in 1963 becomes apparent, the story – in this original version takes on a hyper-real psychological horror that remains a giallo classic. It is fuller and more understandable story than the somewhat garbled edited version. Thankfully, the swinging modish score appears in both versions.
The chapter order also varies depending on the version. In the original Italian, the Karloff starring – and in my opinion the weakest of the three – The Wurdilak is next. In the Anglo version it is last. In any case, the story, though good for a laugh and enjoyable enough, more resembles a Halloween pantomime than anything else.
Originally last of all is the genuinely disturbing A Drop of Water about the perils involved with stealing from a corpse. An effective and at points terrifying ghost story, the accusative face of the dead body is sure to linger on in the memory long after bring presented on the screen. Deserves to be seen by all horror fans, simple as that!
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★ ★
Robert W Monk is a freelance journalist and film writer.
Originally published May 21, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
