3. Black Sabbath - The Drop of Water
Mario Bava did not have much interest in rational people doing logical things. His movies proudly denounced logic and realism in favor of gothic exaggeration and dream-like narrative flows. Blood was redder-than-red, every set was drenched in exaggerated color and spider-webs, and every behavior was magnified and out-sized. BLACK SABBATH takes that tendency and
runs with it, unspooling three stories the seek nothing more than to unnerve and unbalance you with an assault of ghouls and monstrosities. The best of these is The Drop of Water. The story is simplicity itself. A nurse is called to a mansion where a rich old woman has just died, expected to prepare the body for the funeral. Its while talking to the help that details start to mount up. Like the fact that the old woman had become obsessed with the occult. And that she began holding séances, quite successful séances, at that. And that she died during one of those séances. All this is fine and dandy, but its with the first glimpse of the actual corpse that Bava grabs the audience by the nape of the neck and flings them into the deep end of his dream state. When we see the old woman, her skin has mottled to the green-gray color of an EC comics cadaver. Her eyes are bulging, too huge to be contained in her sockets. And shes grinning. Grinning a rictus smile thats wide, far too wide. And shes staring dead into the camera. Its while dressing the body that the nurse decides to steal a priceless ring off the womans finger, accidentally spilling some water and causing a fly to begin buzzing around her head. The nurse leaves and returns home, but she continues to hear the water and be buzzed by the fly. She grows more and more frantic, taunted by the phantom noises into a state of hysteria. She comes right to the verge of madness And then the old woman returns for her ring The Drop of Water is perfection. Perfectly crafted in every area, from image to sound to performance, it is a story that was almost chemically crafted to send an audience into fits of terror. If this twenty-minute segment was released on its own, itd be in the top five horror films of any given year. BLACK SABBATH is an extraordinarily well-done horror film, and The Drop of the Water is the jewel in the crown.
Runner-up: The Wurdalak is an off-kilter vampire tale featuring a diabolical Boris Karloff and one of the creepiest dead kids in horrors looooooong history of creepy dead kids.