Black Sabbath

Snapshot

I tre volti della paura ("The Three Faces of Fear"), released in the United States by American International Pictures as Black Sabbath, is Mario Bava's portmanteau of three supernatural tales. It is the high point of the first wave of Italian Gothic horror. "Il telefono" (The Telephone) is a chamber thriller: a Parisian call girl, Rosy (Michèle Mercier), is terrorised by anonymous phone calls. "I Wurdalak" (The Wurdalak) is a folkloric vampire tale set in rural Eastern Europe, with Boris Karloff as Gorca, a patriarch who comes home from killing a Turkish bandit and begins to prey on his own family. "La goccia d'acqua" (The Drop of Water) is a ghost story about a nurse who steals a ring from the corpse of a medium. Karloff introduces all three as a sardonic master of ceremonies.

This was Bava's first horror film in colour. Its saturated, non-naturalistic lighting became a signature of his work and of Italian genre cinema more broadly. The film survives in two quite different versions, Bava's Italian cut and AIP's re-edited, re-scored English version, and that has shaped its reputation ever since. It now stands as one of the anthology form's essential works, a key step toward the giallo, and the source of a famous borrowed name: the rock band Black Sabbath.

Industry & production

The film came out of the Italian popular industry of the early 1960s. Production ran through the filone system, in which producers rushed out cycles of films imitating a recent hit. Bava's La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960) had been an international success, especially in AIP's American release. Along with Riccardo Freda's I vampiri (1957) and later L'orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock (1962), it had established a Gothic filone aimed largely at export markets.

I tre volti della paura was an Italian-French co-production (Emmepi Cinematografica, Galatea Film and the French Société Cinématographique Lyre), with AIP involved as American partner and distributor. AIP's part explains Karloff's casting. He was under contract to the company in this period, alongside its Roger Corman productions (The Raven, The Terror, both 1963), and his name gave the film a marquee value in the English-speaking market. AIP had also just released Corman's own Poe anthology, Tales of Terror (1962), which offered a commercial template for a three-story horror film with a star at the centre.

The film opened in Italy in 1963. AIP released Black Sabbath in the US in 1964, with substantial changes. The segment order was reversed ("The Drop of Water," "The Telephone," "The Wurdalak"). Roberto Nicolosi's score was replaced with music by Les Baxter. Karloff's linking material was reshot or altered, and "The Telephone" was restructured (see Narrative). Most published discussion of what Bava "intended" assumes the Italian version. Tim Lucas's research for Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (2007) is the most detailed account of the production, and of how the two versions differ.

Technology

Shooting in colour was the key technical decision. Bava had trained as a cinematographer and had lit colour pictures before, notably the peplum Ercole al centro della terra (Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961). His most recent horror work had been in black-and-white: Black Sunday and La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much, 1963). Here colour serves as an expressive tool rather than a realistic one. Strong gels (magenta, emerald green, cobalt blue, amber) are set against one another within a single shot, and light changes colour in the middle of a scene with no source in the story.

The production had modest means and relied on studio work. Like many Italian genre films of its time, it was shot without synchronous sound and post-synchronised. Bava's skill with in-camera and practical effects mattered on a tight budget: mattes, miniatures, studio-built "exteriors," and mechanical wind and lighting effects. The film's famous final shot exposes exactly this artifice (see Mise-en-scène).

Technique

Cinematography

Ubaldo Terzano is credited as director of photography, with Bava. Terzano had been Bava's camera operator, and scholars generally treat the film's look as Bava's own design. The three segments are lit in three distinct ways:

• "The Telephone" uses a cool, enclosed palette for a modern apartment. Shadows and accent colours tighten as the night goes on, and the framing stresses the phone as an object and Rosy's isolation inside the set.
• "The Wurdalak" is the most painterly segment: blue-violet night exteriors, mist, and firelit interiors broken up by green and red. Karloff's face is often lit from below or from the side in unnatural colour, so that he looks like a figure from a story-book illustration.
• "The Drop of Water" goes furthest. A storm outside drives a pulsing, flickering light, and green and purple washes play across the nurse's flat. The dead medium's face is lit and composed for maximum shock, and it is one of the most reproduced images in Italian horror.

Bava's camera moves slowly and creeps forward. He often used the zoom, which was becoming a feature of Italian filmmaking in these years.

Editing

The editor was Mario Serandrei, a major figure in Italian cinema best known for his long collaboration with Luchino Visconti, who had also cut Black Sunday. The cutting is patient. Suspense comes from duration and repetition (phone rings, drips, footsteps) more than from rapid montage. Each segment builds slowly to one sharp payoff. The anthology structure creates its own rhythm: the Italian order moves from a contemporary thriller to period folklore to a ghost story set around 1900, ending on the purest supernatural shock. The AIP reordering changes that arc entirely and closes on Karloff's segment, to make the most of its star.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Bava's staging is studio-bound and makes no attempt to hide it. The sets are designed spaces built for lighting rather than believable places: the Wurdalak family's farmhouse and the ruined abbey where Vladimir and Sdenka shelter, the nurse's cluttered rooms, Rosy's apartment. Props carry great weight: the telephone, a knife, a stocking, the medium's sapphire ring, a buzzing fly, a dripping tap. Each segment is built around one fetish object.

The film's best-known gesture comes at the end of the Italian version. Karloff, in character as Gorca and apparently riding through a nocturnal landscape, addresses the audience. The camera then pulls back to show the studio: he sits on a prop horse while crew members run past carrying branches to suggest movement. The reflexive joke strips away the illusion the film has worked to build and admits that the fear was manufactured.

Sound

The soundtrack was assembled in post-production. Sound effects are pushed forward and repeated until they become motifs: the ringing phone in the first segment; wind, howling and a child's voice crying at the door in the second; the drip and the fly in the third. Nicolosi's Italian score is restrained and atmospheric. Baxter's AIP replacement is more emphatic and in keeping with American horror scoring of the period. Because every voice was post-synchronised, the film exists in dubbed tracks in each market. Karloff voiced his own role in English, and the international cast was dubbed to varying effect.

Performance

Karloff's Gorca is the film's acting centrepiece, and it is often cited as one of the best roles of his late career and one of his rare turns as a vampire. He plays Gorca with a grave, drained menace and keeps the creature's emotional pull on his family in view. His framing appearances are dry and playful in a different register. Michèle Mercier, then becoming a star in French and Italian cinema, carries "The Telephone" almost alone, and her panic is built mostly in reaction to an off-screen voice. Jacqueline Pierreux's nurse in "The Drop of Water" moves from petty greed to hysteria with nearly no dialogue. Mark Damon (an American actor working in Italy) and Susy Andersen play the doomed romantic couple of "The Wurdalak" in a deliberately conventional, story-book style.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film is a portmanteau of self-contained stories joined by a host, with no frame narrative of the Dead of Night kind. Each tale has a simple moral shape: a hidden sin or desire (jealousy, love that turns predatory, theft from the dead) is punished in a closed, almost fable-like way.

• "The Telephone" (Italian version): Rosy believes the calls come from Frank, her former pimp, who has escaped from prison. She turns to her estranged friend Mary (Lidia Alfonsi), and the film implies Mary was once her lover. Mary turns out to be making the calls to win Rosy back. Then Frank really arrives and strangles Mary by mistake, and Rosy kills him with a knife. AIP's version removes the lesbian subtext and adds a supernatural twist: Frank becomes a ghost who torments Rosy from beyond the grave. That change suited the anthology's "supernatural" billing, but it blunted the segment's psychological, proto-giallo logic.
• "The Wurdalak" adapts Aleksey K. Tolstoy's story "The Family of the Vourdalak" (written in the 1830s–40s). Its horror lies in the idea that the wurdalak preys first on those it loves most, so family affection itself becomes the way the evil spreads.
• "The Drop of Water" is a short revenge tale, where greed brings back the dead.

The Italian credits name the sources as Chekhov, Tolstoy and Maupassant. Lucas and others have shown that these attributions are mostly unreliable or decorative. Only the Tolstoy source is clearly established.

Genre & cycle

The film belongs to two cycles at once. It is a late peak of the first Italian Gothic wave (roughly 1957–66), with its castles and farmhouses, revenant aristocrats and folkloric monsters. "The Telephone," meanwhile, extends the urban, contemporary suspense of Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much: a woman alone, a threat she can only hear, a twist in who is guilty, eroticised violence, and a stocking and a knife as weapons. Bava's Sei donne per l'assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964) would turn this into the template for the giallo, so "The Telephone" stands between the two films as a crucial link.

As an anthology, the film sits in a line that runs from Dead of Night (Ealing, 1945) through Tales of Terror to the British Amicus portmanteaus that started with Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965).

Authorship & method

Mario Bava (1914–1980) was the son of the cinematographer and special-effects pioneer Eugenio Bava, and he became a director after decades as a cinematographer and uncredited "rescuer" of other directors' troubled productions. His approach centres on the image: atmosphere, colour and visual invention come before psychology or plot logic. He was known for improvising solutions on a budget. He was ironic about the genre he worked in, and the closing studio reveal is a clear statement of that.

Key collaborators:

• Ubaldo Terzano (credited cinematographer). Bava's long-time operator, who also shot Blood and Black Lace.
• Mario Serandrei (editor). Gave Bava's genre films the polish of an editor from Italy's prestige cinema.
• Roberto Nicolosi (composer, Italian version). He also scored Black Sunday and The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Les Baxter scored the AIP version, as he had Black Sunday's US release.
• Screenplay: Bava, Marcello Fondato and Alberto Bevilacqua. Bevilacqua later became a well-known novelist and director.
• Boris Karloff, whose presence as both performer and host shapes the film's tone.

Movement / national cinema

The film belongs to Italy's popular-genre cinema, not the art cinema of Fellini, Antonioni and Visconti that was winning international prestige at the same time. That popular cinema was built for export, often co-produced, and post-synchronised for many markets. Cast and crew sometimes took English pseudonyms to pass as Anglo-American, although Bava is credited under his own name here. Italian critics at home generally treated such films as disposable. Their reputation was built later, largely by French and Anglo-American critics and fans. The film also reflects the European co-production structures of its period, with a French partner and a French lead actress.

Era / period

The film was made in 1963, at the height of Italy's "economic miracle," when the domestic industry turned out large numbers of genre films. The peplum cycle was fading, and the Spaghetti Western was about to arrive with Leone's Per un pugno di dollari (1964). Gothic horror was enjoying a brief boom both in Italy and through Hammer in Britain. Colour was becoming standard for export genre films. Censorship was easing slowly, which let the film suggest sexual themes (prostitution, same-sex desire, incestuous undertones in the Wurdalak family) that the American distributor then cut back. In this sense the gap between the two versions records the different limits of what Italian and American audiences could be shown in the early 1960s.

Themes

• The family as a site of danger. The wurdalak turns love into hunger. Gorca's return makes his home a trap, and each victim then goes after the next loved one.
• Desire and the forbidden. The Italian "Telephone" ties terror to sexual jealousy and to a past same-sex relationship between the two women. The wurdalak's bite is eroticised as a seduction.
• Greed and the dead. "The Drop of Water" punishes theft from a corpse, an old folk-tale motif staged with modern intensity.
• Sound and mediated threat. The phone voice and the off-screen dripping put terror in what is heard rather than seen.
• Artifice and spectatorship. Karloff's address to the camera and the closing studio reveal frame fear as a show put on for the audience, a self-awareness unusual for the genre at the time.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception. On first release the film was received much like other Italian genre imports. American reviewers judged it mostly through AIP's altered version, and the record of serious contemporary criticism is thin. Its standing rose with the critical rediscovery of Bava, which began in French criticism, continued through fan publications such as Tim Lucas's Video Watchdog, and became widely available once the Italian version was released on home video. It is now often ranked among the best horror anthologies, and "The Drop of Water" is frequently named one of the most frightening short works in the genre. Karloff's performance and Bava's colour design are the parts most praised.

Influences on the film (backward). Earlier models of the anthology form include Dead of Night and, most directly, Corman's Tales of Terror. The literary Gothic of Tolstoy's vampire story stands behind "The Wurdalak," together with the folklore of Eastern European vampires. Bava's own earlier work also feeds into it: the Gothic imagery of Black Sunday, and the urban suspense and Hitchcockian borrowing of The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Karloff carries over his Universal and AIP screen persona.

Legacy (forward).

• The giallo. "The Telephone" is generally counted among the direct precursors of Blood and Black Lace and the thrillers of Dario Argento and others that followed.
• Colour in horror. Bava's expressive gels shaped later Italian horror, most visibly Argento's Suspiria (1977), and the wider aesthetic of non-naturalistic colour in horror.
• Horror anthologies. The Amicus cycle, and later American anthologies on film and television, follow the "host plus three tales" model that Black Sabbath and Tales of Terror did much to popularise.
• Popular culture. The band Black Sabbath, formed in Birmingham in the late 1960s, is widely reported to have taken its name from the film's English title. The band's own accounts say a cinema near their rehearsal space was showing it. Quentin Tarantino has been reported as citing the film's anthology structure as a model for Pulp Fiction (1994), though accounts of his exact remarks vary.
• Scholarship. The film is central to Bava's canonisation, above all in Lucas's All the Colors of the Dark. It is a standard reference in histories of Italian Gothic and of the horror anthology.

The film shows what the Italian popular industry could achieve with very little money in the early 1960s: a director's control of colour and design able to stand alongside the more prestigious national cinemas of the day.