Black Sabbath
The most gruesome day in the calendar!
To start off, there are two versions of this film: the Italian version (I Tre Volti Della Paura) and the American version which was distributed and partly financed by AIP. The film that I saw was the American version - this was edited to match the style of Roger Corman’s Poe movies that were popular at the time - right down to the literary inspiration - and Boris Karloff was drafted in to provide some superbly Hitchcockian links to hold together the three tales that make up this film.
Mario Bava was the director who started the gialli style of filmmaking which is much more about style and atmosphere than about the substance such as plot and characterisation. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated superbly in A Drop Of Water - the first of the three tales and based on a short story by Chekhov - in which a nurse steals a ring from a corpse (a superbly grotesque wax dummy). The plot is old and well known and the ending inevitable. And these are the elements Bava turns to his advantage, hitting us with an extended sequence of sheer tension - small things such as a dripping tap, each one building on the last, never allowing for any light shocks to relieve the atmosphere. This is an absolutely superb piece of filmmaking and one that held me to the edge of my seat right to the end.
This sort of menacing atmosphere is far easier to build when the story is familiar enough that elements such as plot, characters and dialogue can be ignored in favour of the moodily lit visual ride that Bava is so good at. What dialogue there is never quite rings true but there is so little of it that this hardly matters in this segment. Of course, this film was made in Italian and dubbed into English, so it is possible that there is much that was lost in the translation - although I doubt it. The main reason for mentioning dialogue at this point is that we can then seague nicely into the second - and weakest - of the three stories, The Telephone (based on a story by F.G. Snyder) which revolves around a lone woman being terrorised over the phone. This segment simply didn’t work since the both the characterisation and dialogue were so weak as to distract my attention away from the atmosphere and towards the huge and glaring holes in the plot.
However, things get back on track for the final story in the trilogy - The Wurdalak. Karloff plays the central character in this effective twist on the vampire myth brought to you courtesy of Tolstoy. Although not as powerful as A Drop of Water this tale of vampires that only feed on their loved ones does do an excellent job of serving up a darkly brooding atmosphere with an intense and supernatural feel. And what do you do if the horror outside is your father or your son? The whole theme of this segment is a rare and welcome twist on the vampire movie and one that not only adds hugely to the overall atmosphere but also generates some real edge-of-the-seat moments.
The only thing that lets down this segment is it’s shortness. We have a third of a film in real time and only two nights in story time to develop the relationship between travelling nobleman Vladimir D’Urfe (Mark Damon) and the daughter of the segment’s central character, Gorca (Boris Karloff). This is simply not enough time to realistically develop things to where they need to be and leads to the plot feeling rushed. That said, the final scene is still unnerving.
Black Sabbath is a great film and one of the few genuinely frightening horror films in existence. If you like horror films, you need to see this one. And if you don’t like horror films you need to see this one more.
Thursday 15 Mar 2001 | Paul Pritchard | Horror
