Kritiken

Bava once stated that movies were "a magician's forge": "They allow you to build a story with your hands," he said, "… at least, that's what it means to me. What attracts me in movies is to be presented with a problem and be able to solve it. Nothing else; just to create an illusion, and effect, with almost nothing." And that is exactly what one sees in this clever admission of handcrafted artistry. With Black Sabbath, Bava joyfully revels in the romanticized sentiment of movie magic.

Sapphic flame embodied as a knife under a pillow. The panning camera gives a Manet view of a cadaver at the close, and that's how La Voix Humaine becomes a terse giallo blueprint. "The Drop of Water" is the concluding segment, another use of a dissolving female psyche as the linchpin for a positively Minnellian mise en scène.

Gargantuan, ornately designed sets consume so many square feet of Bava's studio that lights appear to be just barely tucked out of frame, a limitation that only makes the film's acrobatic camera wizardry all the more impressive. That the seams, ever so precariously implied, never quite show is a testament to the considered craft on display to saddle these potentially tawdry quickies with their necessary levels of punctuation.

It's stripped down, but in a much different way than Kidnapped. Bava uses minimal dialogue to set the sequences, and then leans on filmic language almost entirely, from the flamboyantly expressive lighting to the actors and their makeup to the all-important sounds of water and a buzzing fly.

Bava's mastery of lush, atmospheric storytelling has made him one of the [horror] genre's most influential forefathers, and compared to the inconsistency of today's omnibus shockers ("V/H/S 2," "The ABC's of Death"), his trippy triptych remains near timeless.