About

Black Sabbath is perhaps the greatest anthology horror film ever committed to celluloid. Its three tales of terror are brilliantly realised through Mario Bava's inventive direction, with cinema icon Boris Karloff providing a short introduction send-off to the film, as well as appearing in its central episode. Although Black Sabbath has no narrative connection to Bava's Black Sunday 1960, the two films act as quintessential examples of gothic cinema and would serve as key influences on horror filmmakers for decades.

The first episode of the film is entitled "The Telephone". It follows a French call-girl who calls on her former lover to help her evade the threatening phone calls of the pimp she helped send to jail. The central, and longest, episode is "The Wurdalak", set in the Russian wilderness in the 19th Century. Karloff's patriarch returns to his family after leaving them to hunt "wurdalaks" – that is, vampires – but with him comes secrets and terror. Finally, in "The Drop of Water", a nurse in turn-of-the-century London steals a ring off an elderly medium who died during a séance – but quickly finds that the corpse wants it back.