Black Sabbath

• The Birmingham band took its name straight off this film. Bava's anthology went out in the English-speaking world as 'Black Sabbath' (the original Italian title is 'I tre volti della paura,' The Three Faces of Fear); the then-unknown group, originally called Earth, spotted a local cinema marquee playing the film, marveled that people paid money to be scared, and rebranded itself before going on to help invent heavy metal.
• AIP didn't just translate the film, they rebuilt it. The American cut reordered all three segments and heavily re-cut 'The Telephone,' stripping out the story's references to prostitution and the lesbian relationship between the two women and turning the human stalker into a literal ghost whose note eerily writes itself on screen.
• Two completely different scores exist. Roberto Nicolosi wrote the moody, restrained music for Bava's European version; AIP threw it out and had studio workhorse Les Baxter compose a replacement, a busier 'scary music' score that critic Kim Newman singled out for overdoing the shock stings on every jolt.
• 'The Wurdulak' is the only time Boris Karloff ever played a vampire. The segment adapts Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy's novella 'The Family of the Vourdalak' (written 1839), a Slavic take on the bloodsucker who can only feed on the people he loves, set down decades before Stoker's Dracula.
• Karloff's per-segment introductions weren't in Bava's original at all. The Italian version has him only bookend the film at the start and finish; it was AIP that reshot extra wraparound footage in Los Angeles so he could personally hand off each new story to American audiences, the same host trick he'd been doing on his TV series 'Thriller.'
• 'The Telephone' is one of the earliest gialli on film, a single-apartment thriller of threatening phone calls that pre-dates the genre's codification and points straight at the stalker pictures Bava and his successors, and later films like 'When a Stranger Calls,' would build their reputations on.

The whole anthology is one long argument that greed gets you, not ghosts. The nurse in 'The Drop of Water' isn't punished for disturbing the dead, she's punished for the ring, the corpse's eyes only follow her after she's already pocketed it, and the haunting reads as her own guilt rotting her from inside until she strangles herself in the mirror of her own theft.

Read AIP's butchered 'The Telephone' against Bava's original and the supernatural 'ghost call' angle becomes the real horror. The studio's censorship turned a grounded story about a woman trapped by her own past and her relationships into something that has to invent a phantom, which is its own commentary on how American audiences would rather believe in spooks than in the messy human ugliness Bava actually filmed.

Karloff's wraparound host isn't framing the stories, he's confessing. He bookends the film and then becomes the monster of its bloodiest tale, the Wurdulak who comes home to feed on the people who love him most, suggesting the kindly old narrator and the thing scratching at the family's door are the same appetite wearing two faces.

Boris Karloff steps out of the dark to walk you through three nightmares, each a different shade of dread. A call girl is hunted by a voice on the line that should belong to a dead man. A nurse pries a sapphire ring off a corpse and learns the dead keep ledgers. And in the cold heart of the set, Karloff himself returns from the wilderness changed, hungry, circling his own grandchildren. Bava splashes the whole anthology in poison greens and bruised purples, turning fear itself into a color wheel.