Black Sabbath (1963)
Directed by Mario Bava
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.
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What critics compared Black Sabbath to
There are many other echoes of screen horror here: clips of Maria Bava’s Black Sabbath; portents of domestic madness in the mode of Polanski’s Repulsion; a general sense of claustrophobia that’s more than a little reminiscent of The Exorcist; a use of grey paint and an overall color-leeched palette to rival The Sixth Sense; and as female-centric psychological horror, it also recalls the evocation of shadow-steeped nocturnal anxiety so chillingly staged in Robert Wise’s The Haunting (63).
A key influence is the terrifying “The Drop of Water” segment of Mario Bava’s 1963 masterpiece “Black Sabbath,” a movie seen on Amelia’s television.
In the last couple of years, Scorsese has paid public tribute to famed 1940 low-budget horror producer Val Lewton (the man behind such classics as “The Cat People” and “The Leopard Man”) by producing a documentary examining his life and work and to Italian cult director Mario Bava (“Black Sunday,” “Black Sabbath,” “Twitch of the Death Nerve”) by penning an introduction to author Tim Lucas’ mammoth biography on the man and with this film, he has found the ideal vehicle to celebrate their work in purely cinematic terms.
Indeed, the mystery of the film and the mystery of the tape provide a double-barreled denouement in one of the most intensely disturbing scenes of recent memory, echoing such notable moments in horror history as David Cronenberg's Videodrome, the "Pigeons from Hell" episode of Thriller and the "Drop of Water" segment of Mario Bava's Black Sabbath, while offering something fresh at the same time.
The post-modernity extends off-screen: Dario Argento produced, and the director is the son of Mario (Black Sabbath) Bava.
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The stories are rather facile, their ironies unilluminating; contrary to the suggestion of its Oscar validation and overall success (the movie swept Argentina’s equivalent of the Academy Awards, and is the biggest homegrown box-office hit in that country’s history), the film is not an advance, in themes or style, over such predecessors as the omnibus horror thrillers of the 1960s and ’70s (“Black Sabbath,” “Tales from the Crypt”).
Spindell puts him front-and-center in an ambitious and impressively stylish horror anthology that also owes a lot to Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, with Brown acting as the film’s Boris Karloff, serving in the role of storyteller.
Steven Price’s score begins with what’s known as the most dissonant melodic interval in music, the tritone (see the track “Black Sabbath,” by, well, Black Sabbath), and jives nicely with the stacks of needle drops.