Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath is a 1963 Italian-French horror anthology directed by Mario Bava, made up of three separate stories of supernatural terror. In the first, an isolated woman is tormented by menacing phone calls that seem to track her every move, until a friend comes to stay with her. The second follows a traveler who takes shelter with a family in a remote rural area, only to learn that the household's patriarch has gone missing and may return changed into something predatory. In the third, a nurse who steals a ring from a dead woman pays for the theft when the deceased returns to claim what is hers.

Bava directs from a screenplay he wrote with Alberto Bevilacqua and Marcello Fondato, with Lionello Santi producing. Boris Karloff leads the cast as Gorca in the vampire segment and also serves as the film's on-screen narrator. The cast includes Mark Damon, Michèle Mercier, Susy Andersen, Lidia Alfonsi and Jacqueline Pierreux. The film sits between Bava's Black Sunday and The Whip and the Body in his directorial filmography.

Released in August 1963 with a 95-minute runtime, the film holds a 7/10 rating on IMDb from around 16,000 votes and a 7.2/10 on TMDB from roughly 500 votes. A critics' rating of 6.8/10 from 19 reviews places it broadly in line with audience assessments.