I TRE VOLTI DELLA PAURA (Black Sabbath)

Digitmovies continues to explore the wonderful world of horror and fantasy of Mario Bava by releasing on CD, as Volume VIII, the complete OST by Roberto Nicolosi from the 1963 movie "I tre volti della paura" (aka "Black Sabbath"). The movie is divided into three episodes: "Il telefono" from the F.G. Snyder story (even if in the opening credits it is credited to Guy De Maupassant) and starring Michèle Mercier (Rosy) and Lydia Alfonsi (Mary): During one evening a woman is tormented with phone calls from a man who threatens to kill her. "I Wurdalak" from a story by Aleksej Konstantinovic Tolstoj ("Sem'ya vurdalaka"): The episode is starred by Boris Karloff (Gorka), Mark Damon (Vladimiro D'Urfe), Susy Andersen(Sdenka), Massimo Righi (Pietro), Glauco Onorato (Giorgio), Rika Dialina (Maria) and tells of the terrible fate that hangs over a family which is victim of vampirism. "La goccia d'acqua" comes from a story by Anton Cechov and stars Jacqueline Pierreux (Helen Chester), Herriet Medin (neighbour), Gustavo De Nardo (Police inspector): A nurse is cursed after she has stolen a ring owned by a spiritualistic woman who had died just before. Three nightmare stories filled with all those elements so typical of the Bava cinema and perfectly scored by Bava's favourite composer Roberto Nicolosi. At the time of the film's release no record, neither 45 rpm nor 33 rpm, was issued and only in 1998 italian RCA had issued a CD ( OST 138) which contained 16 selected tracks especially mixed in stereo (about 29:46) from "I tre volti della paura" coupled with the OST "Il rosso segno della follia" by Sante Maria Romitelli (complete OST available on Digitmovies CDDM107). Maestro Roberto Nicolosi has well succeeded to musically represent this fabulous terror trilogy by creating different music for each episode: For "Il telefono" he has created jazzy and bluesy themes which perfectly reflect the urban atmosphere of the noir movies from the the '50s/'60s; for "I Wurdalak" the Nicolosi score is symphonic of a classical kind with dramatic, mysterious and romantic passages with sonorities typical of the movie genre in the vein of British Hammer pictures. For "La goccia d'acqua" Nicolosi has composed an experimental kind of music performed by a small orchestra of organ, harp, celesta, bass guitar, gong and percussions which anticipates by a few years the psychedelia (and quite astonishingly it also reminds one of some later background music for "Star Trek", the classic series from 1966-1969!). For this very long CD (72:42) we could use the complete mono master tapes of the original recording sessions preserved in the RCA archives that gave us the chance to release for the very first time - beside the 16 stereo tracks - the complete film score in good mono sound (42:56) with every note recorded for all the three episodes. Another true and proper musical rescue of the Italian Silver Age and a sincere tribute to the inimitable art of Mario Bava.