31 Days of Horror: Black Sabbath

Boris Karloff returns home in the middle segment of horror anthology Black Sabbath.

In addition to our regular programming, every day this month, Last Cinema Standing will be bringing readers recommendations from the best of the horror genre as we make our way to Halloween. This should not be treated as a “best of” list but more as a primer. You can read the full introduction to Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror here, and be sure to check back each day for a new suggestion.

Day 8: Black Sabbath (1963)

This is what fear looks like. Black Sabbath, originally titled The Three Faces of Fear, is a horror anthology from Italian cult filmmaker Mario Bava. It is comprised of three tales of terror, each focusing on people who have allowed fear to consume them. As fear becomes the primary motivation, logic and reason go out the window – and with them, the hope for salvation.

With that emotional core as the only connecting thread, Bava tells the stories of a modern woman being terrorized by her telephone as she lounges alone in her apartment; a man in the early 1800s who arrives at a family’s home after one tragedy but whose very presence portends an even greater tragedy; and a pre-World War I nurse whose nagging conscience manifests itself in an all-too-real way.

Though it lacks the overt religious implications of his previous and intentionally similar-sounding Black Sunday, overtones of moral turpitude and divine punishment ring throughout each segment. This is most evident in the middle portion, in which the head of the household, played by an unmistakable and irreplaceable Boris Karloff, may or may not have been turned into a vampire. Religion has always had its place in horror films, often in a direct battle between good and evil, and Bava employs this to add gravity and weight to the proceedings.

Anthologies have been around since the beginning of storytelling – think “One Thousand and One Nights” or “The Canterbury Tales” – but are particularly well suited to horror. With each segment in Black Sabbath the length of a short film, the tension ramps up to an almost intolerable degree right from the start, and Bava sustains it the whole way, providing catharsis only in the mayhem that results when the tension finally breaks.

With recent horror films like the V/H/S series and The ABC’s of Death, anthology movies have been thrust back into the spotlight. Efforts like these find their DNA in the George Romero-produced Creepshow and in EC Comics such as “Tales from the Crypt” and “The Vault of Horror.” They have a reputation for being hit or miss, mostly as a result of the creative teams behind each story working on different wavelengths. While the conceit may tie things together, there is rarely a thematic underpinning to the effort.

This is not the case with Black Sabbath, for which Bava directed each of the three segments, and while the stories traverse time and space, they resonate in their shared preoccupations with guilt and punishment. There is nothing but this to connect these gruesome tales, but Bava ensures they feel of a piece, and the whole enterprise benefits from the guiding hand of a horror maestro.

Tomorrow, we pick our side in the fight between good and evil.

31 Days of Horror: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a masterpiece of set design and shadow.

Welcome to October, when the nights get longer, the temperature drops, and the ubiquity of autumn coloring rears its head once again. The annual harvest is upon us, as well as the harvest festival to end all harvest festivals: Halloween.

For horror film aficionados, there is no better time of year. It is a much-maligned genre done no favors by the sheer volume of material produced under its banner, but now is when fans can let their fright flags fly with pride. In that spirit, I will say that I love horror films. I often am asked what my favorite genre is, and since saying “good movies” is vague and unhelpful at best, I say horror.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are marked by fright-fests such as Jaws, Child’s Play, Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, and the Tales from the Crypt television show. They terrified me, and when I was not scared to death, I was loving every minute of it.

Too afraid to watch but just as fearful I would miss the best part, I spent hours staring at the television through the spaces between my fingers or crouched behind the couch, popping my head up on the chance I might see the very thing from which I was hiding. Was I too young to watch some of what I was seeing? Probably, and there are moments and images that are burned into my brain. But I would not trade a second of it.

Horror does not work for many people. Some find it too frightening, while others on the opposite end of the spectrum feel it strains credulity even at its best. I am not here to argue with either camp; rather, I am here to guide and recommend.

What this means for us here at Last Cinema Standing is a little shift in format this month. The site will continue to bring you reviews of the latest fall films and updates on the Oscar season as it progresses, but we will be throwing into the mix a compendium of horror as we work our way to Halloween.

This is not a “best of” list. Think of it more as a primer, meant to inspire you to try something new or to pop an old favorite into the VCR – still the best way to watch horror films outside of the cinema, though DVD, BluRay, and streaming will work in a pinch. I will try to cover as many different types of horror as possible, spanning decades and directors, suspense and suspension of disbelief. The hope is by the end we will have changed a few minds – or at least given a couple people a good scare.

Day 1: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? There had been movies dedicated to the macabre with dark themes and elements of the supernatural before 1920. However, none had put all that together before Robert Weine delivered this terrifying and disorienting masterpiece of German expressionism. Told in flashbacks and set in a claustrophobic hell-scape of a German village – designed to reflect the broken psyche of the storyteller – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari packs a blockbuster’s worth of heart-pounding suspense and hair-raising fear into 67 minutes of abject terror.

Francis and his fiancée, Jane, attend the town carnival, where Dr. Caligari awakens a somnambulist who predicts a man will die before dawn. When the man is murdered, Francis is convinced Dr. Caligari and the somnambulist are to blame. As Francis tries to prove his suspicions, the town realizes it is in danger from an enemy it cannot fully comprehend.

The plot twists and turns around this basic premise like vines wrapping around a trellis, and the higher you climb, the less you feel the ground beneath your feet. But the real joy is the sensation of allowing the film’s imagery and imagination to wash over you. The sets, built from paper and painted shadows, are all sharp angles and treacherous turns. Filtered through the mind of a man recalling past traumas, the danger takes on mythic proportions as we walk alongside him down these impossible corridors.

Weine and screenwriters Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer had no template for what they were trying to accomplish. No one had ever attempted anything like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, so they forged their own path. Their fellow German filmmaker F.W. Murnau followed two years later with the much more widely seen and highly regarded Nosferatu, but this film laid the groundwork for everything the horror genre would become. And for that reason, it kicks off our month of the macabre and Last Cinema Standing’s 31 Days of Horror.

Tomorrow, we dive deeper into the terror of the demented and deranged with a consideration of one of the all-time great cinema villains.