Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath (1963)

I tre volti della paura

A story that goes beyond the boundaries of the Supernatural to the half-world of the living dead...Where a woman's soul inhabits a fly's body...Where vampires suck only the blood of those they love dearest.

Three tales of supernatural horror include a woman plagued by threatening phone calls, a family targeted by vampiric monsters, and a deceased medium who wreaks havoc upon the living.

Date of release
1963-08-17
TMDB
7.2 / 10 (503)
Runtime
1h 36m
Genres
Horror
Director
Mario Bava

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: The Family of the Vourdalak

Black Sabbath is a 1963 horror anthology film directed by Mario Bava. The film consists of three separate tales that are introduced by Boris Karloff. The order in which the stories are presented varies among the different versions in which the film has been released. In the original, Italian print, the first story, titled "The Telephone", involves Rosy who continually receives threatening telephone calls from an unseen stalker. The second is "The Wurdulak", where a man named Gorca (Karloff) returns to his family after claiming to have slain a Wurdulak, an undead creature who attacks those that it had once loved.

Production

In 1958, American International Pictures founders James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff hired Italian talent agent and producer Fulvio Lucisano to look for commercially viable Italian films for them after the large success of the Italian feature Hercules (1958).

The casting and crewing of Black Sabbath was divided between the film's three main production partners: Galatea cast actress Susy Andersen while retaining Mario Bava, who had directed several of their films, including Black Sunday, American International Pictures secured Mark Damon and Boris Karloff, and Societé Cinématographique Lyre secured Michèle Mercier and Jacqueline Pierreux (the latter is credited under the pseudonym "Jacqueline Soussard"…

Bava is credited as writing the film's script along with Alberto Bevilacqua and Marcello Fondato. The film's opening credits credit the stories as "The Drop of Water" by Anton Chekov, "Sem'ya vurdalaka" by Aleksey Tolstoy and "The Telephone" by Guy de Maupassant.

Bevilacqua stated that Bava wanted to create stories about how terror can strike mankind in different time periods and asked his screenwriters to get him stories from books. After Bevilacqua finished his draft the screenplay, Marcello Fondato was brought in to work on it. Bevilacqua claimed that he was recalled for later rewrites but that most of his added material was cut from the final film.

It was decided early in production that Boris Karloff would not only star in one of the tales, but also act as the film's host; he had recently hosted his own anthology television series, Thriller. Karloff was under contract with American International Pictures, and had just completed filming The Raven for them. The film's cinematographer is credited as Ubaldo Terzano but Bava shot several scenes himself without credit.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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