The Faces of Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath

The original Italian title for Mario Bava’s 1963 film, I tre volti della paura, which translates as “The Three Faces of Fear,” is far more appropriate than Black Sabbath – the title chosen by its international distributor American International Pictures, who also recut, redubbed, and removed parts of the film. The numero tre of the Italian title refers to the three short tales making up the film’s portmanteau – “Il telefono” (“The Telephone”), “I wurdalak” (“The Wudurlak”) and “La goccia d’acqua” (“The Drop of Water”) – while paura refers to the sense of fear permeating each story. By the time he directed Black Sabbath, his sixth officially credited film, Bava had already established a reputation as a director of filone films (Italian B-movies), making a variety of spaghetti Westerns, sword and sandal epics, science fiction and fantasy – although it was in the realm of fantastical horror and suspense that he most exceled. In 1963, Bava directed three horror films alone, with La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much) and La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and the Body) being the other two. 

As a stylist, Bava is synonymous with an expressionistic use of bold, saturated colours and a baroque sense of décor which aim to stimulate the spectator on a subconscious level. In his tome on the director’s work, Tim Lucas characterises Bava’s approach to the horror genre as “rhapsodic”, largely owing to the “ripe overstatement of his visual sense.”¹ Lucas paints a picture of a director less interested in a scenario’s realism or the “narrative motivation” behind a character’s emotional state than in “chromatic daring” and “florid exaggeration” within the mise-en-scène. Bava believed that “the correct colour or mise en scène” could “bring the underlying truth of a moment to the surface – truth that could be more readily felt than explained.”²

In Black Sabbath, the horror depends heavily on the recurring emphasis upon volti/faces and their sensuous capacities. In each segment, a feeling of dread is derived from the characters’ growing inability to trust their senses. “The Telephone” follows a young woman, Rosy (Michèle Mercier), who is terrorised by late night phone calls from an unseen assailant. As she sits isolated in her apartment, the caller describes her and her surroundings in remarkable detail, making her highly conscious that she is being watched. The film’s final segment, “The Drop of Water,” also follows a lone woman being terrorised in her apartment at night – this time, a nursemaid named Helen (Jacqueline Pierreux) who is haunted by visions of an elderly medium that she knows to be dead. The longest segment with seemingly the biggest budget, “The Wudurlak”, is the film’s centrepiece and features the largest cast of characters, including international stars Mark Damon and Boris Karloff (who also hosts wraparound sections of the film). The segment tells the tale of a family of 19th century farmers who are visited by a vampire-like creature referred to as the wudurlak, who gradually infects each member of the family by inhabiting their bodies and transforming their faces. In each of these stories, fear emerges in the ontological gap between the visible and the knowable, as what each character can see doesn’t align with the truths they think they know. Rosy cannot see her attacker but knows he is there. Helen can see the woman but knows she is dead. The farmers see their family members but know they are not truly themselves. Bava’s use of the close-up explores this uncanny territory that exists between a sensory and cognitive understanding of the world. 

In attempting to characterise the power of the medium, early film theorists considered the close-up in both scientific and spiritual terms. Figures such as Béla Balázs and Jean Epstein were overwhelmed by the close-up’s capacity to capture the hidden details of the human face. Balázs saw the close-up almost as an act of aesthetic clairvoyance, believing there was a “new world discovered by the film camera” that made the human spirit visible.³ In increasing the scale and size of a subject’s face, Balázs argued that the close-up functioned as a “magnifying glass” that exposed “the microdynamics of physiognomy,” revealing the inner “feelings, emotions, moods, intentions, and thoughts” of a camera’s subject.⁴ The close-up allowed a historically unprecedented view of the nuances of human expression. Like Balázs, Epstein considered the close-up as a scientific process of magnification that produced near metaphysical results, and wrote of being “hypnotized” by the sudden appearance of a face upon the screen, which “seems to address me personally.”⁵ Interestingly, when attempting to articulate the close-up’s connection with the senses, Epstein used an affective language rooted in horror, writing that “Pain is within reach…I can count the eyelashes of this suffering. I would be able to taste the tears.”⁶ For Balázs and Epstein, the best close-ups were an attempt to reach out and see beyond the immediately visible and reveal a deeper layer of human truth. In the process, the facial close-up forges an intense type of identification between the spectator and the cinematic subject. 

Figure 1, 2 & 3

In Black Sabbath, Bava demonstrates a similar understanding of the human face as the primary site of audience identification. Both “The Telephone” and “The Drop of Water” are constructed entirely around the respective performances of their female actors and their capacity to externally manifest an accurate representation of fear. By returning to the same framing at different intervals within the narrative, the close-up also charts the escalating intensity of their emotional state. Across three variations of Rosy speaking to her assailant on the telephone, the close-up reveals subtle modulations in the growing anxiety of Michèle Mercier’s performance (Figure 1-3). As Rosy progresses through different stages of apprehension, worry and outright panic, there are subtle but noticeable shifts in her facial expression and bodily gestures. In each successive image, she clenches the phone with a harder grip, and the tightness of her brow becomes more pronounced. As the shadows enclosing her face intensify, the growing pool of sweat on her forehead gains prominence as it catches the remaining light. The close-up performs a similar function in the latter half of “The Drop of Water,” tracing the shifting modes of Jacqueline Pierreux’s decidedly more erratic and jittery performance. As the segment’s suspense builds, the close-up conveys a mounting sense of nervousness that explodes into an instance of extreme fright. As spectators, we are not only looking at the characters’ looking, but also at their attempts to see. We witness their endeavours to understand their environment through sight and to establish presence through the use of their senses – yet the outcomes of the scenarios suggest it is folly to attempt to do so.

Figure 4

In every section, the close-up is also used to show an alternative face that possess seemingly human qualities but can only exist in a fragmented, degraded, or deadened form. In his visual absence, Rosy’s counter in “The Telephone” is imaginatively constructed from different constituent parts: a voice, a pair of eyes behind a blind, a photograph. In “The Drop of Water,” Helen’s alternate is a ghostly figure given a tangible physical presence, but with a deadened face that has frozen into one solitary expression, as if the close-up itself has both embalmed and re-animated the dead medium. In “The Wudurlak”, Bava’s expressionistic colour palette emphasises the physical degradation of the face. Initially, the farmers are depicted as models of health, with make-up and lighting emphasising the smoothness of their skin and the vitality of their features. The creature is depicted quite differently: in its introductory shot (by proxy, the introductory shot of Karloff’s character), its face is cast half in shadow, and the little light that remains only exaggerates the actor’s physical aging as it catches on his wrinkle lines and the heavy bags underneath his eyes (Figure 4). By the segment’s conclusion, the creature has inundated the family and each member’s face has been reconfigured in a similar manner, recast with unnatural colour gels that rob the performers of their original skin tones (Figure 5-7). The British critic Raymond Durgnat referred to Bava’s use of colour as a form of “dissonance”, wherein colour highlights were often “‘off-key’ clashes” with their backgrounds.⁷ Durgnat commended Bava for being “ready to risk ugliness in his search for emotional resonance.”⁸ In “The Wudurlak”, the ugliness of the transformed farmers’ faces contrasts with the harmony of the conventional three-point lighting emphasising the beauty and vitality of the living. 

Figure 5, 6 & 7

Each segment in Black Sabbath calls into question the representational status of the close-up. As much as the close-up is a record of ontological truth, it is also a manipulation: it conceals, fragments, embellishes, misrepresents. Bava understood that the editing of a film is a Frankenstein-like process: in the representation of a reality, the scene is dismembered and broken apart into isolated constituent pieces before being stitched back together and called whole. The facial close-up is merely Frankenstein’s head, bolts and all. In Black Sabbath, the close-up warns us against being overly confident in our own understanding of the world: to be conscious of our senses but to not always trust them.

I tre volti della paura/Black Sabbath (1963 Italy/France 92 mins)

Prod Co: Galatea Film, Emmepi Cinematografica, Lyre Film Prod: Lionello Santi, Alberto Barsanti Dir: Mario Bava Scr: Marcello Fondato, Alberto Bevilacqua, Mario Bava Phot: Ubaldo Terzano, Mario Bava Ed: Mario Serandrei Mus: Roberto Nicolosi Prod Des: Riccardo Domenici Art Dir: Giorgio Giovannini Cos Des: Tina Grani

Cast: Michèle Mercier, Lidia Alfonsi, Milo Quesada, Boris Karloff, Mark Damon, Susy Andersen, Massimo Righi, Rika Dialina, Glauco Onorato, Jacqueline Pierreux, Milly Monti, Harriet Medin, Gustavo De Nardo

Endnotes