Author’s note: In honor of Halloween, I’m putting up reviews of horror films. Trick or treat, my friends!
Black Sabbath (1963) is a trilogy of macabre tales given brief, blackly humorous introductions by the inimitable Boris Karloff, who stars in one of them. Each tale is intensely atmospheric. The best segment by far is “A Drop of Water†based on an Anton Chekhov story. Sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, a nurse is summoned to the side of a medium who died during a séance. Greed gets the better of her and she takes a ring she admires from the dead woman’s finger. Strange things start happening and, as in many of the best horror stories, the audience never knows how much is “real†and how much is the result of imagination, in this case an imagination warped by a guilty conscience. Jacqueline Pierreux gives an excellent performance as the terrified nurse.
“The Telephone†is a segment in which that ubiquitous convenience turns into a blunt instrument. An elaborately coiffed, dark-haired beauty of the 1960s named Rosy (Michéle Mercier) receives hang-up calls. Then she hears a voice, a male voice at once menacing and sensual. She becomes convinced that it is that of a former lover she helped authorities send to prison. Except she knows it can’t be him because he’s dead. Or is he?
The third in this trio of chillers is called “The Wurdalak.†Set in medieval, rural Russia, it revolves around a family terrorized by vampires and suspicious of Grandpa Gorca (Boris Karloff) who returns home after a too-long stay in the wilderness.
In all three segments of Black Sabbath, performances and writing are excellent and the direction is sure-handed. Mario Bava showed once again in Black Sabbath that he was a master of the horror genre.
