So guess what, fun news – I’m learning Italian!
Mel and I are off to Puglia later this year for a wedding, and I want to be able to do more than blunder around with a small, awkward bundle of rudimentary phrases. (Or worse, rely on English to get around.) My Collins Easy Learning Italian book arrived today, which is fun.
Also fun? This new initiative has got me excited for a second, equally important ambition over the next half-year and beyond: watch as many Italian horror films as possible.
And where else to begin but with one of the most classic Italian terror pictures of all time: Mario Bava’s 1963 anthology masterpiece Black Sabbath? A film so good, one of the most successful rock bands of all time appropriated their name from it; a film with such enduring influence, and that was so far ahead of its time, that is narrative structure would, more than three decades later, inspire Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) – another cinematic classic?
Yet for all this talk about Black Sabbath’s legacy and status, we can’t start any discussion of the film in 2025 without grounding it one simple fact: Black Sabbath still holds up. Even now, 62 years later, all three parts of Bava’s portmanteau have the ability to captivate, chill, and compel us in turn; that is, when they’re not outright scaring the pants off us.
So let’s dive into this holy trinity of stories – the Italian title of which, I tre volti della paura, translates literally to The Three Faces of Fear – for a quick recap of one of horror’s key cornerstones, and one of the earliest, most influential examples of effective anthology terror put on screen. Read on: it's time for Talking Terror's Black Sabbath (1963) review.
The Telephone
Based on a story by F.G. Snyder, Black Sabbath’s first tale centres on Rosy (Michèle Mercier), a call girl who begins receiving strange, threatening messages on the phone while home alone. Alright, so the plot winds up being a little silly – despite a hell of an effective twist – but the way Bava expertly cranks up the tension of the persistent phone calls, and Mercier’s portrayal of the increasingly agitated Rosy, offsets this.
Soon, we’re introduced to Mary (Lidia Alfonsi) – Rosy’s friend and former lover – and learn that Rosy’s former pimp, Frank (an uncredited Milo Quesada), has just escaped from jail and is out for revenge. As I mentioned, the ending is a bit soapy and forced, and you’ll have to get used to the dubbing (I watched in Italian with English subtitles, but it was clear the actors were speaking a range of languages – most of which weren’t Italian. It’s the same in many Italian films from this era all the way through to the 90s, and one I observed in my review of Demons (1985), which was directed by Umberto Bava, Mario’s son.) Yet for the most part, The Telephone is a masterclass in single-location shooting, as Bava ratchets up the thrills with limited space, actors (and, yes, a limited script). Still, the segment’s DNA is visible in films as varied and influential as Black Christmas (1974), Halloween (1978), When a Stranger Calls (1979), and Scream (1996) – not to mention being a precursor to early giallos like Argento’s The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970). Flawed, yes; but still brilliant!
The Wurdalak
The Wurdalak stars Boris Karloff – who also appears in a brief, self-referential pair of Hitchcockian framing scenes to introduce and close the trilogy of tales – as Gorca, the patriarch of a family living in the wilderness of 19th-century Serbia.
Gorca left to fight the Turks over five days ago, but issued a grave warning before he left: that if he had not returned home by the sixth day, he would no longer be himself but instead a 'wurdalak': an undead, vampire-like creature that takes pleasure in preying upon those it loved most in life. When the tale’s protagonist, Count Vladimir D’Urfe (Mark Damon), comes across the family, old Gorca is just about to return home – and let’s just say he’s not quite feeling like himself.
The Wurdalak was made as a French-language feature film recently – and you can read my review of The Vourdalak (2023), to find out more about it – and Bava doesn’t have nearly as much time to play with here. That shows, in parts, and we’re never able to connect quite as well with Gorca’s doomed family members as we are in director Adrien Beau’s more recent adaptation. That said, the meat in the Black Sabbath storytelling sandwich still gives us plenty of iconic shots (a hooded Karloff, as the wurdalak, escaping with a young victim on horseback, cackling against an electric-blue night sky, has to be the most memorable), and the grief-drenched scenes with the unfortunate young Ivan are truly chilling.
The ending is a bit of a bummer, but where The Wurdalak truly succeeds isn’t in the strength of its tale – which is adapted from a short story by Alexei Tolstoy, Leo’s second cousin – but in its aesthetic. Bava’s The Wurdalak wrings every drop out of its set, its actors, and its setting (the naturally petrifying woods of feudal Eastern Europe) that’s not only about look and feel, but about feeling. And it’s a pretty damn terrifying one.
The Drop of Water
I’ll say it: The Drop of Water is, for my money, the best individual segment of any horror anthology film, ever. Tall claim, I know – but hear me out.
The story is simple: Helen Chester, a nurse in 1910s, is called by a housekeeper to the home of an elderly woman – a medium, I guess – who recently died while communing with the spirits of the dead. While preparing the corpse for burial, Chester impulsively steals a ring of the deceased’s finger and, well…from here, everything starts to unravel for her over a single night, as the cursed corpse enacts its revenge.
What’s so wonderful about The Drop of Water is that it’s genuinely scary. By today’s standards, you can’t necessarily say that about a huge portion of horror films made in the 1960s, but the elements Bava employs here – the exposition from the housekeeper, the eerie appearance of the dead woman, the E.C. Comics-style twist in the tale, the didactic moralism wrapped up in the story’s message – it all works. And that’s without even mentioning the sensory element Bava uses to striking effect here: sound.
The Italian director eschews any reliance on non-diegetic music here to instead focus on sound of a terrifyingly diegetic nature. Be it through the relentless buzzing of a fly or the metronomic discharge of the eponymous drop of water, Bava puts us right in the world of our central character as an ill-advised act of larceny descends into a maddening, macabre spiral of insanity and death. The Drop of Water is 25 minutes of cinema that makes you wish you hadn’t seen it, so you can experience the joy – in this case, terror – of doing it all again, and needs to be seen in all its unadulterated glory.
I won’t spoil even a word more of here – go check it out. Now!
Black Sabbath (1963) Review: Further Reading
That just about wraps up my review of Black Sabbath (1963). It’s a little late (62 years late, to be exact) but you’ll forgive me – I’ve only been alive for half of that.
Enjoyed this rapid retrospective? Check out my other contemporary lookbacks on classic films like The Video Dead (1987), Mortuary (1982), and Braindead (1992).