Black Sabbath, or, Snore Pigs

The poster for the American release of Black Sabbath shows a headless man barreling through the countryside carrying the decapitated head of one of his victims, while four young women bare their ample cleavage in horror. You can’t quite call it false advertising, but it definitely takes liberties with the kind of thrills that are contained in this movie. The movie contains three horror comic-style stories: “The Telephone” is about a woman receiving threatening phone calls from a man who wants to kill her and can see everything she does. “The Wurdulak” is about a family dreading the return of their father, who went to the mountains to kill a vampire-like creature that craves the blood of the people it loved most in life. And “A Drop of Water” is about a nurse called in to help prepare the body of an old woman who died while conducting a séance. Boris Karloff appears as the father in the second story, and he also delivers a charming segment as himself, as an introduction and an epilogue…