The scariest horror movies based on short stories – Looper

Italian horror maestro Mario Bava's 1963 anthology film Black Sabbath attributes its three startling stories of supernatural horror to source material by three authors whose last names should be familiar to avid readers of 19th-century world fiction de Maupassant, Chekhov, and Tolstoy.

Well, that's only partially true. The Tolstoy credited with the source material for "The Wurdulak," a story of Russian vampires, isn't War and Peace author Leo Tolstoy but his second cousin, Alexei Tolstoy, who was better known for his plays. And it's not Anton Chekhov who penned the inspiration for the supremely creepy "Drop of Water"but someone named Ivan Chekov, who actually isn't a real person at all but something of a joke by Bava and credited co-writers Alberto Bevilacqua and Marcello Fondato. As for Guy de Maupassant's involvement in "The Telephone," some historians suggest that this is again a fabrication and, in fact, there's an additional credit for someone named "F.G. Snyder," who is also a made-up individual though Bava historian Tim Lucas has suggested that the episode bears a passing resemblance to de Maupassant's story "The Horla," which was made into Diary of a Madman, starring Vincent Price and released the same year as Black Sabbath.

Regardless of real or imagined authors, Black Sabbath is one of Bava's most enjoyable and spine-chilling titles, thanks in no small part to Boris Karloff, who both narrates the film and brings the shivers to "TheWurdulak."

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The scariest horror movies based on short stories - Looper