When I was a kid growing up in Indianapolis, we drove down to my see my grandparents in Louisville at least one weekend a month, sometime more often. While we were there, my parents’ normally very strict monitoring of how much TV I watched and what I was watching were inexplicably relaxed and I got to spend long Saturday and Sunday afternoons watching reruns of old shows and movies.
This was the tail end of the 1970s and very early 1980s, so there was no cable TV and I was limited to the stuff that the local broadcast stations used ot show on the weekends. It was my introduction to the original Star Trek series, a lot of the Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe stories, sci-fi movies like Crack In the World and George Pal’s 1953 version of The War Of the Worlds, and a lot of Godzilla movies.
In other words, this was probably some of the most formative TV-viewing of my life.
As I said, though, my parents otherwise tended to keep a pretty tight rein on what sort of stuff I watched, so I did not have much experience as a kid of watching actually scary TV shows or movies. As such, I would get super-freaked out by really basic stuff that I saw on TV that was even remotely creepy.
One of those images that stayed with me for years came from something I watched on one of those afternoons at my grandparents’ house. The image was the discolored, creepy face looking in a window. As childhood traumas go, it was right up there with the Danny Glick scratching at the window in the Salem’s Lot miniseries. Except this one was even scarier because I could never remember what it was from.
Now flash forward forty years. I have been going down a rabbit hole the last week or so with Italian horror. As I mentioned the other day, I had never really been able to get into any of the films from that subgenre that are generally supposed to be classics, but I have also never really tried to get into them. Three or four movies in now, however, and I find that I am enjoying and appreciating these movies quite a bit.
So there I am, watching Mario Bava’s 1963 horror anthology Black Sabbath, and suddenly this image appears on the screen:
THAT IS IT! That is the image I remember from all those years ago. It is Boris Karloff as the title character in the middle segment of the film, “The Wurdulak”. It’s a vampire-like creature from Slavic folklore, and while the whole anthology is quite good, this segment is far and away the best.
I may have more to say about the other two stories in the movie (they’re great too) in a separate post, but watching “The Wurdulak” now, I am kind of surprised that I actually saw this as a kid and wasn’t more traumatized by it. The story is truly horrific and ends badly for anyone. It draws upon the horror of being trapped in a family and your loved ones turning against of, of being a child at the mercy of adults, and it even presages the ideas of bodily contamination and corruption that Night Of the Living Dead (which came out a full five years after this film) tends to get all the credit for.
Bava’s lighting, staging, and framing of shots are all stellar; I defy anyone to find anything in any other film that is as creepy as the shots of the family house or the abandoned convent here. And while I did not think I could be any more shocked and horrified than when Karloff’s Gorca walks off into the forest carrying the child Ivan, it was even worse when the undead Ivan returns, scraping at the door and begging his mother to let him back in (so that he can kill her and the rest of the family). This movie pulls surprisingly few punches for having been made in 1963.
This film really does deserve all the praise it gets in the horror community and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Maybe just don’t watch it if you’re a little kid the early 1980s.