and Samuel Z. Arkoff hired Italian talent agent and producer Fulvio Lucisano to look for commercially viable Italian films for them after the large success of the Italian feature Hercules (1958). In February 1963, American International Pictures made a deal with the Italian film production company Galatea that they would contribute to a minimum of nine co-productions in the next eight years. Black Sabbath follows many production trends of Italian films of the era. These co-productions were influenced by the lack of large film stars in Italy. To avoid high costs or larger stars, producers created anthology films involving three or four short narratives whose combined running time was that of a regular feature film, as in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow (1963). A second trend was to match an up-and-coming actor or a much older actor with a European ingenue actress, as in Spy in Your Eye which paired Pier Angeli and Dana Andrews. The third trend was the move towards making Westerns and horror films which were less expensive to produce than the previous sword-and-sandal films. Pre-production The casting and crewing of Black Sabbath was divided between the film's three main production partners: Galatea cast actress Susy Andersen while retaining Mario Bava, who had directed several of their films, including Black Sunday, American International Pictures secured Mark Damon and Boris Karloff, and Societé Cinématographique Lyre secured Michèle Mercier and Jacqueline Pierreux (the latter is credited under the pseudonym "Jacqueline Soussard" on American prints). Mercier had previously worked with Bava on The Wonders of Aladdin (1961), for which he had directed its second unit. Bava is credited as writing the film's script along with Alberto Bevilacqua and Marcello Fondato. The film's opening credits credit the stories as "The Drop of Water" by Anton Chekov, "The Telephone" by F.G. Snyder and "Sem'ya vurdalaka" by Aleksey Tolstoy. Bava later took credit for the original story of "The Drop of Water", but Italian critic Antonio Bruscini traced its origins to a story titled "Dalle tre alle tre e mezzo" ("Between Three and Three-thirty") that was included in a 1960 anthology book titled Storie di fantasmi (Ghost Stories). British historian Julian Granger identified the author of the story as Franco Lucentini. "The Wurdulak" is loosely based on The Family of the Vourdalak by Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy The story of "The Wurdulak" was found in the 1960 anthology I vampiri tra noi. Other parts of