Boris Karloff appears as a warmly menacing Master of Ceremonies in both I tre volti della paura and Black Sabbath, but the host footage is dif- ferent in each, unique to each. In the Italian version, Karloff appears only twice as host—once at the beginning and again at the end. He does not in- troduce the stories individually; these are presented with their own main titles. In the AIP version, Karloff in- troduces Black Sabbath by name at the top, returns to introduce each sub- sequent episode individually—and then confounds audience expectations by not returning at the end to tie a bow around the whole package. AIP was motivated to adopt indi- vidual story introductions partly by their desire to imitate Thriller and partly by their decision to resequence the stories. Arkoff and Nicholson re- alized the importance of giving their impatient young audiences a monster as soon as possible, so they reassigned “The Telephone” (a sleek thriller with neither monsters nor Karloff) to middle position, and moving “The Drop of Water” (with its blood-chilling dead medium) up front. Their strategy also involved withholding Karloff’s “The Wurdalak” episode—the actor’s show- case—till last, to keep the audiences in their seats and to send them out of the theater on a high note. A sound plan in theory, but not in practice. Unfortunately, AIP’s re- sequencing of the stories negated the transitions which Bava had so care- fully woven into his film’s tapestry. Bava had filmed the stories to dove- tail into one another visually: “The Telephone” ends with a man being stabbed to death; “The Wurdalak” be- gins with Vladimir discovering the body of a man stabbed to death, and ends with faces gazing through a win- dow; “The Drop of Water” ties all three together by opening with a woman gazing through a window, her reverie shattered by the ringing of her tele- phone. (The fact that this last episode commences with echoes of both of its preceding stories may indicate that
GAG PHOTO of Mario Bava frightening the King of Horror, Boris Karloff.
