Never enough Bava in October: Sabbath at Black

Ah, yes, Black Sabbath. Never was there a more perfect Bava film for this month than Black Sabbath. Bava and Boris together…the stuff dreams are made of. Now if only Vincent Price had made a more memorable starring role in a worthy Bava film, perhaps another film could be an annual prize for October.

"The Telephone" predates When a Stranger Calls by almost two decades and tells us of an elegant beauty terrorized by a psychotic voice telling her across the phone that eventually she would be killed. Feeling trapped in her own home, the phone ringing off and on to further torment her, and someone is just outside somewhere continuing to play with her mental state like a violin. She reaches out to a friend to come over as it is believed that the voice on the other side of the phone is an escaped convict with ties to her, Frank. But could he just be a red herring? Bava isn’t considered the godfather of the giallo for nothing. The proof was before this (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) and The Telephone is another example of his mastery at building a suspense story where a female lead is placed in a developing vice where a mysterious killer could violently surprise her at any moment. The clever ruse of a twist can be welcome in such plots in the giallo. Who you believe is your ally could in fact be your enemy. And when you invite that very enemy into your home unawares, the question of what will happen remains. The black gloves and shiny knife are momentarily displayed and are total fixtures in the giallo. Alluring women are in this and hints in dialogue suggest they were once lovers. What about Frank? Is he or isn’t he the one threatening to dispose of the heroine? When the person responsible is revealed, how will the story end? A love triangle that ends in one victor, with the prize a beauty both desire…who will be able to claim her? Or will it all end with dead bodies? Even in what is a traditional thriller without gothic trappings, Bava has plenty of style to burn, with those marvel of colors still used so glamorously to punctuate mood.

"The Wurdalak" turns the vampire tale on its head. Mark Damon isn’t a hero. He rides through an area plagued by “bloodthirsty corpses particularly interested in feeding from those they love the most”. A family’s patriarch has ventured out into the “great unknown” to find a murderous Turk so that he could rid their home and surrounding land of a Wurdalak. Damon stumbles on a beheaded corpse with a dagger stuck in the body’s heart. The patriarch (Karloff in another iconic performance, with another iconic character to remember him by) is nowhere to be found so his family is deeply concerned that he himself is a Wurdalak. Damon is a bit miffed at the ravings of this worried family regarding bloodthirsty corpses, but when Karloff rides in, the Wurdalak is proven to be quite real. We witness as one-by-one, each family member succumbs to Karloff. Damon doesn’t rescue anyone. He urges Karloff’s beautiful blonde daughter to flee from the homestead with him! But the remains of a convent (with a skeleton of a nun inside) cannot keep them from her family as Karloff has been responsible in turning them all into the Wurdalak. Damon is asleep when the woman he fell in love with (during this single night!) rises from her rest, walks in a trance-like state out in the open, and her family approaches to “bring her into the fold”. Damon awakens to find her gone, but he will not leave until he finds her. This isn’t your typical vampire tale. Instead of Karloff being put down (as he requested before leaving to find and kill the Turk) by his sons when it is more than clear he’s a member of the undead, he’s left alive, a heart wound visible, his flesh quite pallid, and the baggage under his eyes purple. The fact that he can lurk among them as they sleep and feed from them, even as he has taken away the grandson with the mother willing to stab her husband to “go to him as he cries for his mommy”, there’s an understanding that the Wurdalak uses his past ties to the family to his advantage. They weren’t able to follow his instructions and the Wurdalak seizes upon that to get the blood he so craves. Karloff fits into a Bava universe effortlessly. He always knew how to evoke that menace, and from the moment he appears until the end, that sinister never leaves. With lots of vivid, bright color, Bava hues this tale with a style that removes it from any form of distinct reality. This is a tale told to children at night to scare them. Bleak even as it is an eyeful of wow photographically with aesthetic splendor to groove on throughout, “The Wurdalak” is quite a treat for Bava’s fandom. I think this second tale is truthfully what earns Black Sabbath its prestige. It is one last great Karloff film before Peter Bogdanovich grounded him into a frighteningly real world with Targets. I think it is realized early into Karloff’s emergence from the countryside distanced from his homestead that the Wurdalak would leave this family in tatters. Because they couldn’t accept their father’s turning, he was allowed to besiege them. I think Bava intended for this to be something akin to a nightmare.

 

 The final tale concerns guilt and how stealing from the dead can come back to really haunt you. An eccentric cat lady into seances and "what the cards say" dies (presumably of fright) during one such "table session with the dead". A nurse is bothered at the dead of night to go to the dead woman's home by her maidservant. Placing on the burial gown, the nurse sees a signet ring on her finger that becomes to alluring to leave alone. Taking the ring, the nurse returns home and begins hearing a drop of water, and as each faucet is turned off, the sound continues to intensify. Eventually, the water stops, but the lights go out, and soon she sees the ghost of the dead lady, supposedly wanting revenge for what was stolen from her. This is long on style and takes a simple story of a woman tormented by a conscience that conjures up an imaginary ghoul returning to retrieve what was taken from her after death. Bava returns to the vivid green primarily, and a light from the outside of a particular window goes on and off, kind of similar to a blinking neon sign. A room lit in certain areas, while other parts of the home are dark, and the lead steadily losing her sanity, Bava gets to playfully wring every bit of terror from the nurse's dilemma. Is it scary...not as much as eerie thanks to the frozen expression of madness stuck on the ghost's face.

Then you have Karloff at the end, and Bava concluding his film by telling us "it's only a movie." A horse Karloff is riding a fake, members of the crew trotting about with fake trees, and silly music leading to the credits, Black Sabbath is gleefully ended with Bava leaving us with a wicked wink as his send off.

Black Sabbath (1963) *****