Some of this article appeared previously as “Gothic Yellow: A Mario Bava Retrospective,” which was published on June 19, 2013 by Ravenous Monster (www.ravenousmonster.com)
This is it - the unintentional beginning of doom metal. As they have recounted numerous times in interviews and in books, the members of Black Sabbath (Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward, and Geezer Butler) were inspired to move their heavy blues rock in a darker direction after seeing a poster for the horror anthology film “Black Sabbath” (which was released in its original Italian as “I tre volti della paura,” or “The Three Faces of Fear”). Bemused by the very idea that people would pay good money to be scared witless, the men from Birmingham, who would soon create the sound, style, and image of doom metal, decided to put a little fear into their music.
While this may be a very concise and surface-level interpretation of doom metal’s birth, nonetheless the film “Black Sabbath” is an integral part of the heavy metal story. Shot and released in Europe in 1963, “Black Sabbath” would be eventually picked up for North American distribution by American International Pictures in 1964. Between those years, some fairly significant changes occurred between the Italian and American versions, although ultimately the effectiveness of the film was left intact. Almost all of this power belongs to Mario Bava - the film’s brilliant director.
Bava, a Ligurian by birth but a Roman in temperament, first began working in the Italian film industry in the 1930s. For the most part, Bava was a cinematographer - a position that suited the former painter well - and a special effects artist. Before directing his first feature film, Bava worked with the likes of Roberto Rosselini, and before long the Italian world of cinema was abuzz about Bava’s stirling camerawork.
While Bava began directing dramas and science fiction films in the early 1940s, international fame did not reach him until 1960. In that year, Bava’s “Black Sunday” (“La maschera del demonio”) was released in Europe and abroad. “Black Sunday” is often regarded as one of the last great Gothic horror films, and from its shocking opening to its grand closing, “Black Sunday” is an almost pitch-perfect horror film.
“Black Sunday,” which is very loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s 1835 short story “Viy,” tells the tale of the Moldavian vampire-witch Princess Adja (who is played by the British actress Barbara Steele) and her Satanic curse on her accusers. The first three minutes of “Black Sunday” are some of the most memorable in film history, with the most often cited being the moment when Princess Adja is forced to wear the so-called “mask of Satan” - an iron maiden-like veil that contains imbedded spikes on the inside. Making this scene all the more potent are Bava’s cuts between first - and third-person perspectives, with the first-person view being a shocking glimpse inside of the mask’s torturous interior.
Like the later “Black Sabbath,” “Black Sunday” was released and distributed in the U.S. by AIP, a company that would soon purchase and dub many more European and Asian horror films for their numerous double-dills during the 1960s. AIP also acted as censors of a sort on “Black Sunday” by trimming and editing out many scenes that were deemed too violent. This would prove to be a consistent theme throughout Bava’s career, and despite the fact that “Black Sunday” received mostly positive reviews upon its release, critics and cultural tastemakers alike often agreed that Bava’s work bordered on the grotesque and pornographic.
Later in his career, Bava upped the violence level in his films, with the giallo/slasher hybrid “Blood and Black Lace” (1964) and the splatterpunk “Bay of Blood” (also known as “Twitch of the Death Nerve,” 1971) being the gory standouts. Not only did Bava do much to popularize the bloody and erotic giallo genre throughout the world, but it can also be argued that Bava is the originator of the slasher genre. “Bay of Blood” in particular is not only one of the first movies to combine extreme gore with zany hijinks (a marriage that would be later adapted in Wes Craven’s “The Last House on the Left”), but director Steve Miner felt so compelled by the film that he turned “Friday the 13th Part 2,” which is the cinematic debut of Jason Vorhees as the lone terrorizer of Camp Crystal Lake, into an almost shot-by-shot remake.
When “Black Sabbath” was released, Bava’s bloodiest work lay in the future. In many ways, “Black Sabbath” is the last true Gothic that Bava would ever make (although Gothicism plays a huge role in 1965’s “Planet of the Vampires” and 1966’s “Kill, Baby, Kill”), but even then “Black Sabbath” contains the elements of giallo and noir. In particular, “The Telephone,” which is the second story in the American version and the first one in the Italian, forgoes the antiquated horror of its peers in favor of a thoroughly modern revenge tale.
In “The Telephone,” Rosy (played by French actress Michele Mercier), a high-class call girl, is tormented by the voice of Frank (played by Milo Quesada), her former pimp and lover. Driven to hysterics by Frank’s phone calls (which indicate that he is and has been watching Rosy for some time), Rosy seeks comfort and security in the arms of her friend and lesbian lover Mary (played by Lydia Alfonsi). After putting a tranquilizer in Rosy’s drink, Mary stays up to pen her confession. It was she who called Rosy pretending to be Frank! Despondent over their breakup, Mary thought that a frightened Rosy would once again find her, so she concocted the Frank angle as a desperate ploy to rekindle their lost relationship.
Unbeknownst to Mary, the real Frank creeps up behind her and strangles her with nylon stockings. Realizing that he has killed Mary instead of Rosy, Frank corners a seemingly defenseless Rosy in her bed. When Frank goes to strangle Rosy, her gets stabbed for his trouble by the very same butcher knife that Mary had put under Rosy’s pillow as a small token of protection. Now left in the same apartment with the corpses of her former lovers, Rosy has a break down and her harried shrieks end the segment.
This synopsis captures the original Italian version, but it only grazes the American one. In the AIP version, the lesbian subplot is missing, Rosy’s occupation is more subtly alluded to, and, instead of being a former pimp recently released from jail, Frank is a ghost who died three months prior. This version of “The Telephone” is more supernatural, but it is also more confusing. Instead of being a simple noir-like vengeance tale, this version of “The Telephone” is a paranoia-fueled ghost story set against the backdrop of modern appliances.
As much as this different scripting of “The Telephone” waters down the original, it does however keep continuity with the other stories in the film. Both “The Drop of Water” and “The Wurdalak” are more or less ghost stories, and by making “The Telephone” into a ghost story itself, the AIP rendition of “Black Sabbath” is at least a unified whole.
Before “The Telephone,” “The Drop of Water” opens the American edition of the film (but it ends the other version). In “The Drop of Water,” Nurse Helen Chester (played by Jacqueline Pierreux) commits a crime against the dead by stealing a sapphire ring from the cold finger of a recently deceased medium. According to the medium’s maid (who is played by Carla Mignone, better known simply as “Milly”), the woman died during one of her Friday night séances. While possessed by one of the spirits that she had earlier conjured up, the medium perished with a unbelievably ugly visage, almost as if killed by fright itself. If you haven’t seen “Black Sabbath” yet, then be prepared for one terrifying make-up job.
After having a few close brushes with the dead woman’s hand and the intermittent sounds of dripping water, Nurse Chester returns to her East End flat. Home is definitely not her castle, for the angry spirit of the medium returns to haunt Nurse Chester in her own apartment. Driven mad by the incessant sound of dripping water, Nurse Chester eventually finds the medium’s corpse in her own bed. From there, the ghost moves throughout the apartment and it eventually forces Nurse Chester to strangle herself.
When the police come the next day, a neighbor testifies to her involvement whilst standing next to the twisted deathmask of Nurse Chester. When it’s discovered that one of Nurse Chester’s rings is missing, the detective (played by Gustavo de Nardo) casts his eyes upon the suddenly nervous neighbor. As with “The Telephone,” “The Drop of Water” is a revenge tale that ends with the suggestion that evil has yet to be vanquished.
Still, considering Bava’s love of Russian literature (especially its more fantastic strains), it’s not hard to imagine the “Chekov” ploy as just another way of grounding Bava’s work in the older forms of horror literature. “The Wurdalak,” the film’s best known segment, does have legitimate claims to literature, for it is based on the 1839 novella “The Family of the Vourdalak,” which was penned by the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy. While “The Telephone” is set in contemporary Europe and “The Drop of Water” is set in Victorian London, “The Wurdalak” takes place in the wilds of Eastern Europe during the time of the Ottoman Empire.
In “The Wurdalak,” the young nobleman Vladimir Durfe (played by Mark Damon) stumbles upon a headless corpse with a knife sticking in its chest. The corpse belongs to the wurdalak (a type of Slavic vampire who only preys on loved ones) Ali Beg. The man responsible for Beg’s execution is Gorcha (played by Karloff himself) - the patriarch of a local family who returns to his cottage at midnight. When he returns, the horses in the yard dislike his smell, while his disheveled demeanor and funeral pallor all point to the fact that he himself has become a wurdalak. Giorgio (played by Glauco Onorato), Pietro (played by Massimo Righi), Sdenka (played by Susy Andersen) and the other members of Gorcha’s household (including Vladimir) realize that they must kill Gorcha before he turns the whole family into a vampire clan.
Through gorgeous technicolor cinematography that deftly uses unnatural and neon-like lighting,”The Wurdalak” is by far and away the film’s best story. And even though American censors cut back on some of the original’s blood and guts, “The Wurdalak” is still the film’s violent centerpiece - an atmospheric and moody tale that touches upon certain taboos (for example, the death of children and fratricide).
Although “Black Sabbath” predates the more cultish films of the 1970s (the period in horror cinema that has been very well represented in this column), its stylish take on supernatural sex and violence is quite appropriate for heavy metal music. One fan thought so, and currently on YouTube there is a version of “The Wurdalak” that is set to the music of Electric Wizard’s “Satanic Rites of Drugula.” It works well, and indeed the glossy production of Electric Wizard is a good analog to Bava’s lush film.
Since its release, “Black Sabbath” has been inspiring musicians from Birmingham, England to Birmingham, Alabama. While later Bava is much more gritty and nihilistic (and thus theoretically more in-tune with doom metal), the Bava of the mid-1960s is the ultimate auteur - a master who couples beauty with the baleful; the ungodly with the unbelievable. Bava, in many ways, is the genius who started doom metal’s aesthetic, and yet he was the first one to discard it. By the end of his career, Bava was a shell of his former self, and his final few movies oscillate between horrible and more horrible. As with many trailblazers, Bava’s legacy went mostly unnoticed until later revivals, and thanks in part to the heavy metal and doom metal movements, these revivals started to stick. Nowadays, Bava’s praises are routinely sung by Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, and it goes without saying that doomsters regularly pay tribute to the Godfather of Giallo with their merch, their music, and their movies.
Words: Benjamin Welton
