Black Sabbath

At a glance

I tre volti della paura is an anthology film directed by Mario Bava and introduced by Boris Karloff, who appears as a presenter and plays the patriarch Gorca in the middle episode. The three stories—«Il telefono», «I Wurdalak» and «La goccia d’acqua»—stage three different ways in which the supernatural, or its threat, enters private space: a telephone call, a relative returning home, an object stolen from a dead woman.

For Dread Atlas, the film is an exemplary point of entry because it brings together nearly all of the atlas’s questions: it declares literary sources◆PRIM◆ Primary sourceAn original document consulted directly: a text, record, script or film print.Source: Italian release opening credits, attributes some of them doubtfully○SIM○ Unproven similarityNo corresponding text has been identified for two of the three episodes., adapts a specific story about the Vurdalak, and circulates around the world in two substantially different versions●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: Lucas 2007; editorial comparison of the prints, to the point that one episode changes genre from one country to another.

Context: Italian Gothic

From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s, Italian cinema produced a compact group of Gothic films—castles, crypts, portraits and returns from the dead—often shot on small budgets and designed in part for international markets. The Italian Gothic collection follows its development from I vampiri (1957) through La maschera del demonio (1960) and beyond.

Two aspects of that production system are key to understanding I tre volti della paura. The first is the practice of not recording dialogue live and dubbing the entire film●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: Curti 2015: films were post-synchronised, making it both natural and technically easy to rewrite dialogue for each market (see dubbing). The second is the relationship with foreign distributors, particularly American International Pictures, which had already distributed Bava’s La maschera del demonio in the United States as Black Sunday.

Mario Bava

A long-established cinematographer and the son of a filmmaker, Bava made his official directing debut with La maschera del demonio. With I tre volti della paura, he worked in colour on a Gothic film for the first time; critics have emphasised how colour—saturated greens, violets and reds, and lights with no realistic source—becomes a narrative tool rather than decoration. Here, colour describes not the settings but their degree of contamination¶INT¶ Editorial interpretationAn editorial reading, identified explicitly as interpretation.: cold light crosses the Wurdalak family’s isba without belonging to any lamp.

Boris Karloff, actor and presenter

Karloff has a double role. At the beginning and end, he addresses the audience directly as a presenter, using a format that American television had made familiar. In the middle episode, he is Gorca, the head of a family who returns home transformed into a Vurdalak.

The two appearances have different consequences in the two versions. In the Italian release, an Italian actor dubs his voice●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: editorial comparison of the prints, as was customary; the dubber’s identity is still to be verified…INC… Incomplete informationPartial information, or information awaiting verification against primary sources.. In the AIP release, Karloff speaks in his own voice and introduces each episode●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: Lucas 2007, turning the film into a kind of anthology presented by a host.

The three episodes

Il telefono

Alone in her flat, Rosy receives calls from a man who seems to know her every move and identifies himself as Frank, a man who has just escaped from prison. In the Italian release the episode is a thriller: the calls are a deception, and the ties between Rosy, Frank and her friend Mary are sketched through allusions to prostitution and to a relationship between the two women●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: Lucas 2007; Curti 2015. This is the starting point for the threatening telephone motif.

I Wurdalak

The young nobleman Vladimir d’Urfe finds a decapitated body on the road, a dagger in its heart, and asks a farming family for shelter. The patriarch Gorca has left to kill the Turkish bandit Alibek, giving a precise order: if he returns after a certain time, he must not be let in. Gorca returns with Alibek’s head, but he has already become a Vurdalak and begins calling his family to him, starting with his young grandson. This is the episode that recognisably adapts La famiglia del Vurdalak by A. K. Tolstoy.

La goccia d’acqua

Nurse Helen Chester is called in at night to prepare the body of an elderly medium who died during a séance. She slips a ring from the corpse’s finger. Back at home, she is beset by small signs—a falling drop of water, the buzz of a fly—until the dead woman appears. The episode is linked to the theft from the dead motif.

Declared sources and doubtful attributions

The opening credits collectively attribute the three episodes to stories by Chekhov, Tolstoy and Maupassant. The editors distinguish three very different cases:

Episode	Credited source	Status
I Wurdalak	A. K. Tolstoy, La famiglia del Vurdalak	Derivation verifiable from the text
Il telefono	Attributed to Maupassant (collective credit)	No corresponding story identified
La goccia d’acqua	Attributed to Chekhov (collective credit)	No corresponding story identified

For «I Wurdalak», the derivation is verifiable point by point●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: comparison of story and film: names (Gorca, Sdenka, d’Urfé), the patriarch’s order, the return and the contagion within the family. The situation is the opposite for the other two episodes: no source text has been identified○SIM○ Unproven similarityThe tone and themes may recall the two authors, but affinity does not prove a source., and prestigious attributions to famous names were a known commercial practice in genre cinema of the period. It is plausible that the credits were meant to lend the film prestige rather than document its origins¶INT¶ Editorial interpretationAn editorial reading, identified explicitly as interpretation.; until evidence emerges, the entry remains open.

Tolstoy’s story

La famiglia del Vurdalak was written in French by Alexei Konstantinovich Tolstoy—a second cousin of Leo Tolstoy, not to be confused with him●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.—around 1839◇ATTR◇ Critical attributionThe date 1839 is the most widely used in scholarship; no dated manuscript is known., and first published in Russian translation in 1884●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources., after the author’s death.

It is a frame story: during the Congress of Vienna, the Marquis d’Urfé recounts a youthful adventure in a Serbian village. The film removes the frame, makes d’Urfé younger as Vladimir and moves the setting to an unspecified Eastern European countryside. It keeps the story’s moral structure, however: the Vurdalak does not attack strangers, but the people he has loved●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources..

What is a Vurdalak?

Strictly speaking, the word does not belong to Serbian folklore vocabulary. It is a Russian literary form that entered circulation with Pushkin in the 1830s◇ATTR◇ Critical attributionA reasoned connection proposed by scholars or critics, but not confirmed by the creators.Source: see the Vurdalak entry, probably as a reworking of Slavic terms for a werewolf (volkolak, vukodlak). The cinematic Vurdalak is therefore a third-degree hybrid: Balkan beliefs about the returning dead, a French literary hoax, a Russian poem, an aristocratic tale and an Italian film. The dedicated bloodline traces these steps.

The vampire who returns to those he loves

The episode’s central rule is that the dead return to those they loved, and love becomes the channel of contagion. This feature has a basis in eighteenth-century accounts of Serbian cases, in which alleged vampires attack family members and neighbours first●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: Visum et Repertum, 1732. Dread Atlas catalogues it as a distinct motif: the family vampire, or the family as a vehicle for contagion.

In the film, contagion follows the structure of the patriarchal family itself: Gorca does not lose authority in death; he extends it¶INT¶ Editorial interpretationAn editorial reading, identified explicitly as interpretation.. Each family member who gives in becomes a new emissary of the patriarch.

The vampire child

The episode’s best-known scene is the return of little Ivan, who calls to his mother from the night and asks to be let in. The device combines two elements: the vampire child, which turns the instinct to protect into a danger, and the threshold rule, according to which the dead must be welcomed in. As formulated here, the latter is more literary than folkloric◇ATTR◇ Critical attributionA reasoned connection proposed by scholars or critics, but not confirmed by the creators.Source: see the Threshold and invitation entry.

Theft from the dead

In «La goccia d’acqua», the offence is a small theft—a ring—from the body of a medium. The theft from the dead motif has a long history in European legends about the deceased returning to reclaim what was taken from them. The film isolates and reduces it to essentials: there is no treasure, only an object, and the punishment is disproportionate, as in cautionary legends¶INT¶ Editorial interpretationAn editorial reading, identified explicitly as interpretation..

The bell and the drop: signs of the supernatural

All three episodes use a sound to announce the threat: the telephone ringing, the wind and voices outside the isba, the drop and the fly’s buzz. Sound works like an alarm bell that precedes the image¶INT¶ Editorial interpretationAn editorial reading, identified explicitly as interpretation.: we hear the supernatural before seeing it. The motif is indexed as the sound that announces the supernatural.

The telephone as an invasion of domestic space

In «Il telefono», the threat comes through an object that, in 1963, still represented a relative novelty in private homes. A locked door no longer protects, because the voice gets in anyway¶INT¶ Editorial interpretationAn editorial reading, identified explicitly as interpretation.. This idea runs through later cinema—from anonymous slasher calls to calls from inside the house—and is traced in the threatening telephone entry, which records such links as “resemblance” until they are documented.

The Italian and American versions

The version distributed by AIP in the United States in 1964 is not a simple translation. The full comparison documents the differences; in brief:

• Episode order. Italy: Il telefono, I Wurdalak, La goccia d’acqua. United States: La goccia d’acqua, Il telefono, I Wurdalak◆PRIM◆ Primary sourceAn original document consulted directly: a text, record, script or film print.Source: AIP print.
• Altered dialogue. The English dub rewrites the lines in «Il telefono», removing implications of prostitution and of a relationship between Rosy and Mary●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: Lucas 2007.
• From thriller to supernatural story. In the AIP release, Frank is dead and the calls come from beyond the grave: the episode changes genre●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: Lucas 2007; editorial comparison.
• Soundtracks. Roberto Nicolosi’s music is replaced by a score by Les Baxter●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources..
• Endings. The Italian release closes with a celebrated break in the illusion, revealing the set and crew; the AIP release replaces it●DOC● DocumentedCorroborated by multiple reliable and independent sources.Source: editorial comparison with a more conventional sign-off.

Whether these changes were driven by prior censorship or commercial calculation is a widespread critical reading, not a fact documented in production records◇ATTR◇ Critical attributionA reasoned connection proposed by scholars or critics, but not confirmed by the creators..

Home-video editions

The film’s material history runs through decades of television, VHS and DVD prints that favoured one version or the other. More recent digital editions tend to include both.

Format	Version	Notes	Status
Television and VHS	AIP / Italian, depending on market	Prints often cropped, with degraded colour	To be catalogued
DVD (2000s)	Italian with subtitles; AIP in separate editions	First widely available access to the Italian cut outside Italy	To be verified
Blu-ray (2010s)	Both	High-definition restorations; allows comparison on the same disc	To be verified

Cultural influence

The most frequently cited legacy is musical: the Birmingham band that took the name Black Sabbath in 1969 said it was inspired by the film’s American title◐DICH◐ Stated by the authorA statement by an author, director or production: reliable as testimony, not as proof.Source: interviews with band members. In cinema, the Wurdalak episode remains a key reference for the family vampire in European film, and Tolstoy’s story was adapted again in Italy as early as 1972 in La notte dei diavoli. Affinities with numerous later anthology horrors or films featuring threatening phone calls○SIM○ Unproven similarityAn apparent affinity without evidence of direct derivation. are recorded in the atlas as resemblances, not influences, unless statements or evidence emerge.