Black Sabbath (Mario Bava Collection)

Anchor Bay Entertainment recently released their Mario Bava Collection, Volume 1, containing five films by the Italian maestro: Black Sunday; Black Sabbath; Kill Baby, Kill; The Girl who Knew too Much; and Knives of the Avenger. As I slowly make my way through the attactively-packaged box set, I'll post a review of the individual films, only one of which I've seen (the gothic horror classic Black Sunday).

Mario Bava was an Italian director who used his training as a painter to great effect in the beautiful colours and striking visual compositions of his films. Bava began his film career as a cinematographer, building a reputation as an optical effects expert, and took his first directorial steps by replacing director Riccardo Freda on I Vampiri in 1956 after the filmaker left the project. His first complete film as director, Black Sunday (1960), was a wildly influential gothic shocker that launched the career of 'scream queen' Barbara Steele and unleashed a wave of European horror films that lasted through the 1970s. He worked in several genres, including historical epic, western, science-fiction, and giallo (pulpy psycho-thrillers), but it is his horror films that are most fondly remembered by film fans. He made striking use of lighting, set design, rich primary colours, and visual composition in a directorial style that has heavily influenced subsequent filmakers like Scorcese, Fellini, and Tarantino, and has delighted generations of film buffs. Bava died in 1980, leaving behind a vivacious legacy of pure cinema.

And so on to the first Bava Collection review: Black Sabbath (1963).

Black Sabbath is an anthology of three short horror stories, introduced by Boris Karloff. The Telephone takes place solely in the apartment of Rosy (Michèle Mercier), who is being terrorized by phone calls from an anonymous woman who promises to kill her (and also, in daring--for the time--hints of homosexuality, makes admiring comments about her body). The story is a simple and fairly transparent Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, but is beautifully shot. Bava moves the camera effectively, shooting on one set and using foregrounds and backgrounds to create a sense of depth and texture and claustrophobia. Though it features an obvious twist, The Telephone is a textbook example of how to build and layer suspense through extremely limited means.

The Wurdalak spins the gothic horror story of the patriarch of a family (Boris Karloff) that returns with the curse of vampirism. This story features some evocative set design and pellucid lighting that Bava uses to emphasize character and mood, and some effective shock-editing. In Bava's hands, the stark European landscapes become dark fairy-tale domains bathed in rich primary colour.


The final tale, The Drop of Water, is the most famous and chilling of the three. A nurse (Jacqueline Pierreux) steals a jewelled ring from the finger of a dead psychic, and pays the price when the psychic's ghost returns to claim it. Bava's astonishing use of lighting and colour is most prominent here, with different primary-coloured light focused on different planes in a shot, giving a profound sense of depth that lends itself to uneasiness as we wonder what could possibly be lurking there. The disturbing makeup on the corpse and the ghost, and the use of the sound of dripping water on the soundtrack contributes to the chilling effect of this segment, resulting in one of the most satisfying tales of the supernatural ever committed to film.

The picture quality on the DVD is stunning, beautifully conveying the bright, phantasmogoric colour in rich detail. Black Sabbath is a must-have for all serious film buffs.

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Directed by Mario Bava

Written by:
Mario Bava
Alberto Bevilacqua
Ivan Chekhov (story, The Drop of Water)
Marcello Fondato
F.G. Snyder (story, The Telephone)
Aleksei Tolstoy (novelette, Sem'ya vurdalaka)

Starring:
Michèle Mercier...Rosy (segment The Telephone)
Lidia Alfonsi...Mary (segment The Telephone)
Boris Karloff...Gorca (segment The Wurdalak)
Mark Damon...Vladimire d'Urfe (segment The Wurdalak)
Susy Andersen...Sdenka (segment The Wurdalak)
Jacqueline Pierreux...Helen Chester (segment The Drop of Water)
Milly Monti...The Maid (segment The Drop of Water)
Harriet Medin...Neighbor (segment The Drop of Water)