Black Sabbath (1963)

Spooktober Challenge 2025

Premise: This is an anthology movie, which is something I like because in the end it’s like watching three short movies in one sitting. In this case, we have:

• The Telephone, in which a call girl is being stalked and threatened on the (you guessed it) phone, so she calls her friend/ex-lover (ooh, l-l-lesbian b-b-b-babes!?) so she comes spend the night with her, to feel safer.
• The Wurdulak, which is about what a serbian family needs to do to protect themselves from the titular wurdulak, which is kind of like a vampire but not really, but also yes? but no.
• The Drop of Water, which is about this woman who steals a ring from the recently deceased but looks-like-she’s-been-mummified-for-years corpse of a medium and well yeah that doesn’t sound like the best idea.

Under 90 minutes? Three minutes over…
Do they say the title? Not just that, the version of the movie I watched literally starts with our host saying something like “come closer, please… how do you do? This is Black Sabbath” and I couldn’t stop laughing at how clearly “I’m sure this wasn’t the original title” that moment felt. Delicious.

One sentence review: Skill issue, I would simply not have stolen anything from the megacreepy corpse.
Okay, more: Yeah… the second story is kind of meh compared to the other two, but it still looks amazing. You can basically see most of the first story coming as soon as you hit play. The obvious highlight though is the last segment - good lord why would you even touch that!? Fun stuff, sure it feels super tame nowadays but still.
A simple way to improve it: Instead of having Boris Karloff as the host, I would definitely have invited three different people, each of them introducing the story in their own style. So of course that’d be Elvira, The Cryptkeeper and obviously George Corpsegrinder Fisher telling us how the next story is about shooting blood out of

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

During The Wurdalak segment, Boris Karloff almost never blinks.

It it just me or is this is a bit like saying “the corpse almost never died”…? “Just once or twice, i tell you!”