the film would earn only $419,000 in domestic rentals, an inexplicable drop in profit compared to the earlier film.
How a film of Black Sabbath’s un- questionable quality could have stumbled at the boxoffice is a mys- tery, but perhaps advertising was at fault. One of the more bewildering aspects of the film’s release—all around the world—is that Boris Karloff himself was pictured in almost none of its paper advertising—an incredible omission, considering his then-cur- rent rise in popularity among the young, thanks to Thriller and Shock Theatre presentations of his classic Universal horror films. He did not even appear on AIP’s one-sheet poster de- sign, a magnificent Reynold Brown painting of four beautiful young women cowering from the apparition of a headless horseman. Brown’s al- ternative campaign—which did fea- ture Karloff, as a green-skinned sev- ered head . . . sort of Gorka “as” Olibek—was apparently too graphic for AIP’s tastes (or newspaper repro- duction), although they did sanction its use as an insert-sized poster, with the bloody sliver at the base of the head’s neck painted over with yellow! Elsewhere, only one of the Italian due- foglia designs featured Karloff, in a heavily cropped photographic shot of the actor as Gorka. The most beauti- ful of all the poster art that exists for the film accompanied its French release as Les Trois Visages de la Peur, a paint- ing of the film’s three lead actresses— Michèle Mercier, Susy Andersen, and Jacqueline Pierreux—framed by two silhouetted strangler’s hands. While the comments made by the unnamed critic at Monthly Film Bulle- tin are hardly worth repeating (“Leav- ing something to the audience’s imagi- nation is not an bad policy in this kind of film” 29
), the British release of Black
Sabbath resulted in Bava finding a new champion in Films & Filming’s Peter Cowie. “Mario Bava’s latest film . . . is a good deal better and more thoughtfully worked out than most horror films, and the final story of the three is the best thing of its type since Black Sunday,” he enthused. “The serpentine convolutions of Bava’s