2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 15th

Black Sabbath (1963) [Kanopy]

Truth be told, Scatterkat and I weren't entirely sure what to expect from this one: we knew it was Mario Bava, one of the founders of the Giallo subgenre (and therefore the movie might have a certain amount of luridness and gore, not to mention a bit of sexploitation) and that it starred Boris Karloff late in his career (and therefore the movie might have a certain amount of harmless camp of the sort Karloff and Vincent Price tended to lean into in the final years of their respective careers).  Oh, and naturally we knew a certain English hard rock band borrowed the movie's title when they finally picked the name that stuck and they became famous under (which suggested who knows what: Black Sabbath had a certain rep for being darker than they ever really were, more into the Occult and Satanism than they ever really were, and arguably for being more Heavy Metal than they really were).  (Please write five pages on the following essay discussion topic: although Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath are often named as the inventors of Heavy Metal music, neither was actually a Heavy Metal band.)

Anyway, as far as the movie goes, it probably bends a little more towards the campier side than the lurid grotesquerie side, which is just fine and makes the movie a rather charming and fun affair.  Black Sabbath is the sort of anthology movie they used to make all the time and that hardly ever gets made anymore, and honestly when somebody does come out with an anthology film these days they nearly always seem to take more cues from the nastier and less fun horror films of the '80s or even '90s than they do from the kind of goofier creepshows AIP, Hammer, and other indie distributors cranked out for the late shows and drive-ins.

There are few real surprises in Black Sabbath; I would say there are no surprises but for the fact the movie's first segment, "The Telephone," is a bit more frank and open-minded about queer relationships than one might have expected from a 1963 film (it does appear from the Wikipedia entry that the original American distribution of Black Sabbath cut all of the references to lesbianism from the movie--oh well; I guess that's the difference between American and Europe in a nutshell, isn't it?).  The predictability of the beats in the movie's second section, "The Wurdulak", and the third chapter, "The Drop of Water", in no way take anything away from the enjoyability of Black Sabbath.  One might say that Black Sabbath is the equivalent of a well-done haunted house: the fake blood and cheesy makeup and the expectation that some college student is going to jump out of the mop closet right when the strobe light goes off accompanied by ghoulish laughter on the PA system is a comfortable scare, as is knowing perfectly well that Ivan's mother is making a terrible mistake opening the door for her child the same night she buried him and that you never take jewelry off a dead psychic's finger.

I guess the final observation one might make is that you could accuse the movie of underutilizing Boris Karloff if it hadn't been made when he was in his 70s, six years before his death and thirty years after his prime, and in an era when people simply didn't live and work into their old age the way they do now.  (I see movies where Humphrey Bogart looks ten years older than I am when he was ten years younger, and must recall that everybody smoked a pack and drank two martinis every day.  They lived hard and medicine wasn't what it is now.)  Instead, Karloff's screen time feels about right even if there's less of it than you might expect from his billing; it feels like he's having a blast and happy to get a paycheck.  It's also funny to hear him overdubbed by an Italian actor.  (And there's a funny and cool thing about where we are with film availability these days: instead of only being able to watch foreign films badly dubbed into English, which was often the only option when I was a kid, you can now stream the original cut of a film with English actors dubbed into whatever language the movie was originally recorded in.)

Anyway, we had a good time.  Happy to finally see this one.