As long as you stay in this house, the nightmare will never end.
Coming off The Girl Who Knew Too Much, with its crisp black-and-white cinematography, Mario Bava splashed out with the lush Technicolor compositions of Black Sabbath, also made in 1963. A horror anthology made up of three stories, plus wraparounds hosted by Boris Karloff, who also stars in the middle segment -- or the last one depending on which version you watch -- Black Sabbath is the most successful example of the form this side of 1945's Dead of Night, and one which no amount of meddling can subvert. (For its American release, AIP shuffled the segments around, replaced Roberto Nicolosi's score with one by in-house composer Les Baxter, and gave it the title it's known by today -- its Italian title I tre volti della paura translates to "The Three Faces of Terror.")
Having seen both versions, I can confirm that the Italian one is the more balanced of the two, opening with the contemporary chiller "The Telephone" (based on a story of F.G. Snyder), closing with "The Drop of Water" (based on one by Ivan Chekhov), and placing Aleksei Tolstoy's "The Wurdalak" -- the longest and most ambitious segment -- right in the middle. Taking place almost entirely in the apartment of the easily rattled Rosy (Michèle Mercier), "The Telephone" finds Bava replaying some of The Girl Who Knew Too Much's paranoiac beats as she's plagued by a series of menacing phone calls from someone threatening to kill her. "A body like yours can drive a man to madness," says the sinister caller who claims he can see everything she does and is even able to listen in when she calls her estranged friend Mary (Lidia Alfonsi) for help. Eventually, Bava reveals who's making the calls and why, and he can't resist having somebody show up at Rosy's door wearing sinister black gloves, but this is one case where the payoff doesn't detract from the set-up.
The same goes for "The Drop of Water," in which trained nurse Helen (Jacqueline Pierreux) is summoned to the run-down mansion of a deceased countess because the woman's skittish maid (Milly Monti) won't touch the body. Transfixed by the jeweled ring on the countess's finger, Helen steals it despite being unnerved by the dead woman's rictus grin and staring eyes, which pop open even after she's closed them. It's after the theft that Helen starts hearing the sound of dripping water, which continues to plague her (along with a persistent, buzzing fly) when she returns home, which is spookily illuminated by a flashing blue light. Like "The Telephone," "The Drop of Water" wrings a lot of suspense out of a woman home alone, unsure of who's after them and why. "The Wurdalak," on the other hand, is all about the terror of knowing exactly who to fear.
Of course, it helps when that person is played by Boris Karloff in a furry parka. As Gorca, the patriarch of a close-knit family who sets out to kill a monstrous Turk who's been wreaking havoc in the area and returns a bloodthirsty monster himself, Karloff is disarmingly creepy, overriding the concerns of his understandably frightened children and contriving to steal away his grandson Ivan in the night. In the meantime, a passing count (Mark Damon) falls in love with Gorca's daughter Sdenka (Susy Andersen) and convinces her to go away with him, but she knows she can't escape her fate.
A mini-masterpiece of creeping dread, "The Wurdalak" (which has been adapted for the screen several times, most recently as the episode "Skin and Bones" from the NBC anthology series Fear Itself) is at its best in the sequence where little Ivan calls out to his mother (Rika Dialyna) to let him in, preying on her maternal instincts even though, as her husband (Glauco Onorato) points out, she knows the boy is dead. That's how the wurdalak gets you: by playing the innocent and getting you to let your guard down. As in 1956's Invasion of the Body Snatchers, to do so even for a moment is all it takes to surrender your humanity for all eternity.