Mario Bava's first horror film in colour, I tre volti della paura (The Three Faces of Fear aka Black Sabbath, 1963), followed the making of La ragazza che sappeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) in 1962 and was shot at Cinecitta and Titanus Studios. An anthology consisting of three tales, Bava's film joined an impressive tradition of earlier films utilising a sequence of stories, written either by a single or multiple authors, which were often individually handled by name directors.

In 1932, Edmund Goulding's Grand Hotel and Paramount's anthology If I Had a Million, a portmanteau film helmed by seven directors, provided early Hollywood examples of this format and it continued into the late 1940s with Tales of Manhattan (1942) and Flesh and Fantasy (1943). European directors popularised it in the 1950s. Roberto Rossellini directed segments in several anthology films, including L'Amore (1948), Les Sept péchés capitaux (1952), Siamo donne (1953), and Amori di mezzo secolo (1954). I tre volti della paura or Black Sabbath emerged just after Boccaccio '70 (1962) the Italian anthology film directed by Mario Monicelli, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica.

British studios, such as Gainsborough and Ealing, had followed suit. W. Somerset Maugham's short stories provided material for a trilogy of anthologies, Quartet (1948) and the two sequels Trio (1950) and Encore (1951). Ealing's Dead of Night (1945) is also regarded as one of the first significant examples of the horror portmanteau film, although this tradition had a long track record, starting with Richard Oswald's silent Unheimliche Geschichten (1919). It was British company Amicus who really put the horror anthology on the map with a string of successful films in the 1960s and 1970s, including Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964), Torture Garden (1967), The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Tales from the Crypt (1972), Asylum (1972), Vault of Horror (1973) and From Beyond the Grave (1974).

... a brilliant display of Bava's talents as director and editor

After the huge success of Black Sunday in 1960, Bava's relationship with American International Pictures continued to develop. The company had distributed Black Sunday in the US and were keen to support Bava's next projects, even to the extent of trying to emulate the success of that film by re-titling I tre volti della paura to Black Sabbath for the lucrative US market.

Bava's spoof Hitchcockian thriller La ragazza che sappeva troppo (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) may well have paved the way for the full development of the Giallo genre but it also signalled an increasing demand from AIP producers James Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff to alter Bava's material and make it more suitable for their profitable juvenile, drive-in audiences. Retitled Evil Eye, the US version of the film removed the original's references to marijuana and included additional material shot by Bava to lighten the film for English territories. It was a portent of things to come.

Bava's spectacular use of Technicolor was evident in Ercole al centro della terra (aka Hercules at the Center of the Earth / Hercules in the Haunted World, 1961) and The Girl Who Knew Too Much would be his last film in black and white before he applied his skills with colour to Black Sabbath, a project AIP were keen for him to do after their success with the Roger Corman Poe film cycle which had started with The Fall of the House of Usher in 1960.

Veteran horror star Boris Karloff, enjoying something of a career revival through Corman's films Tales of Terror (1962) and The Raven (1963), was under contract with AIP and, in their deal with Bava, he not only took on a role in the full blown Gothic horror of 'The Wurdulak', one of the three tales in Black Sabbath, but also acted as host for the film. This was something television audiences would have been familiar with after seeing him introduce two weekly anthology series, Thriller (NBC, 1960-62) and Out of This World (ABC, 1962).

The film's screenplay by Bava, Alberto Bevilacqua and Marcello Fondato incorporates three stories, 'The Telephone', allegedly a very loose homage to an 1887 short story by Guy du Maupassant called The Horla, 'The Wurdulak' based mostly on the novella The Family of the Vourdalak by Count Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy but also inspired by another du Maupassant story called Fear, and 'The Drop of Water' attributed to an Ivan, rather than Anton, Chekhov but, as Tim Lucas reveals, is actually based on a story Between Three and Three Thirty by P. Kettridge, the nom de plume of Franco Lucentini. Black Sabbath was shot between February and March 1963, with 'The Wurdulak' the last sequence to be completed at Titanus Studios and joining Karloff in its cast was Mark Damon, the star of AIP's The Fall of the House of Usher and uncredited director of The Pit and the Pendulum.

For audiences of the time, 'The Telephone' is quite bold in placing the lesbian relationship between Rosy (Michele Mercier) and Mary (Lydia Alfonsi) centre stage. There is a tension between the two which underlines the subterfuge Mary uses in order to gain access to Rosy's bed. Rosy's profession is not entirely clear in the film, although her suggested role as call-girl is highly appropriate in how the central symbol of the film, the red and black telephone, pulls together the various competing figures for Rosy's attentions. While Mary is pretending to be Rosy's pimp Frank by disguising her voice over the phone, Frank (Milo Quesada) has already started to stalk Rosy since his release from prison.

The tale is a chamber piece, accentuated by a detailed and modishly ornate setting, heightening the claustrophobic atmosphere, exploring Rosy's self doubt and fear and the deceptions unleashed by Mary. The phone, a recurring Bava symbol, is also part of the sequence's aural power, opening the story with its incessant ringing as Bava's camera prowls around the apartment and eventually comes to rest on Rosy's bed. The bed is where Rosy will eventually be seduced by Mary, who accomplishes this after drugging her, and where Frank will attempt to murder her. Sexual desire and its consequences, its terrors, is at the heart of the film.

Also note how characters affect the atmosphere in the film, shifting in and out of lightness and darkness. Rosy arrives and turns all the lights on in the apartment. She receives the threatening phone calls, seemingly from Frank, and immediately rushes round the apartment and turns all the lights off. Mary arrives and completes this process as she re-establishes her relationship with Rosy in an apartment they used to share. Female power is also divided between the two and is often represented in symmetrical shots.

The salacious phone calls and a brief shot of eyes peering through blinds at the window suggest a voyeurism which is exaggerated by Bava's high angles, sensuously circling camera and shifting points of view. The aural nagging of the phone is joined by ticking clocks and departing footsteps outside the apartment. Sound in I tre volti della paura becomes a vital component in the film as an adjunct to unseen terrors.

The cleverest element of the film is the puzzle about who is calling Rosy. Which of the calls are Frank and which are from his impostor Mary? Frank is clearly observing her (the eyes at the window must be him) because he calls her and berates her for hiding her jewels and money under the sofa. Mary's calls are simply a form of extreme blackmail to get herself invited over to spend the night with Rosy. Revenge takes two forms: Frank seeking his after Rosy handed him over to the police and Mary wanting hers because Rosy has rejected her sexual advances. Neither succeeds. The AIP version removes the lesbian subplot and changes Frank's escape from prison into a supernatural haunting, robbing the original of its quiet subversion.

Trademark elements of the Giallo abound. Frank's voyeurism, captured in those eyes peering through the blinds, and Mary's gloved hand holding a knife in close up would become abiding symbols of Dario Argento's thrillers and the Giallo's combination of violence and eroticism is imbued in the male-female power exchanges worked through both the lesbian subtext of Mary as strong dominatrix and Rosy as her submissive, weak counterpart and where Frank later mistakes Mary for Rosy before he strangles her with a stocking. These are also Hitchcockian elements too and the segments reflects the director's work in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960) and anticipates the full-blooded Giallo films to come from Bava and his successor Argento.

At the centre of this tightly paced claustrophobia, luridly highlighted by golds, reds and purples, is a twitchy, trembling and effective central performance from Michele Mercier as Rosy, whose fear escalates throughout the twenty five minute duration. It culminates in her tearful shock as, from her point of view, the camera trails across the dead bodies of her two 'romantic' attachments, with the red and black phone in the foreground off the hook, disconnected, and only the ticking of the clock to accompany her. Wedded to this is an appropriately sultry, jazzy score from Roberto Nicolosi.

... a searing examination of patriarchal power and deep rooted familial bonds

In direct contrast 'The Wurdulak' transports us back to the non-specific Eastern European setting of Black Sunday but this time restages its vampire tale in lush Technicolour. A wandering nobleman Count Vladimir d’Urfe (the handsome Mark Damon) stumbles across a headless corpse on his journey and he takes it and the ornate knife sticking in its back to a nearby house. There he discovers the knife's origins, belonging to the missing father of a family cowering in dread and fear in the misty forests.

Giorgio (Glauco Onorato) recognises his father Gorca’s knife and relates to Vladimir the terrible curse they fear has befallen him since he left home to seek revenge on a local clansman turned vampire Alibeq. Before leaving he warned them if he had not returned by the stroke of midnight after a period of five days then he would be a vampire, or wurdulak, too. As Vladimir acquaints himself with Gorca's sons Giorgio and Pietro (Massimo Righi), beautiful daughter Sdenka (Susy Andersen), Giorgio's wife Maria (Rika Dialina) and his baby son Ivan, Gorca (Boris Karloff) returns home.

'The Wurdulak' is a searing examination of patriarchal power and deep rooted familial bonds, bonds extending beyond life and into death as Gorca patiently claims the members of his family anew through a very different set of blood ties, the blood line of the undead. Resisting this subjugation is Vladimir who desperately attempts to rescue Sdenka from the clutches of the wurdulak and its plague but because of his own promise of undying love to Sdenka is recruited to their ranks.

Bava's mise-en-scene is fullsome and rich, a brooding Gothic tale viewed though skeletal trees, banks of mist and crumbling ruins, immediately recalling the ancestral resting place of Asa in Black Sunday. Painted in vibrant shades of pale green and lavender, perhaps indicating the sickness and corruption threatening to swamp Gorca's family, Bava's control of the imagery is superlative. It underscores some specifically unsavoury elements nestling in the bosom of a superstitious, fearful clan too.

When Gorca returns home after the stroke of midnight and brandishes the head of the dead villain Alibeq, his sons and daughter encounter a supernatural incarnation of their father, the ultimate patriarch who will completely deny them free will. Maternal longing and female desire will be manipulated by Gorca, to conquer and subjugate any attempt by Maria and Sdenka to defy male dominance.

At the centre is the chilling undercurrent of incest and paedophilia as Gorca overtly covets his little grandson Ivan, then kidnaps him and transforms him into a keening undead spirit able to drive his mother to despair and murder, injuring her husband as he prevents her from opening the door. The scenes of the boy begging to be allowed into the house after rising from his grave are disturbing, his wailing another use of sound to render the uncanny on a soundtrack already smothered in howling wind.

Karloff is quite exceptional here, a looming, gimlet eyed monster pinching the cheek of his innocent grandson one minute and then draining his son Pietro of life the next. This is Bava's signature theme of the dysfunctional family locked into its ancestral urges writ large, quite unsentimentally so, and comes complete with familiar visual decoration. The face at the window, a key Bava motif, is repeated when first Gorca glares through frosted up glass at his anxious family and then, at the conclusion of the film, as the vampire clan close in on Sdenka and Vladimir.

In the end sentimentality and desire are eradicated in favour of ancient family repressions and 'The Wurdulak' is striking as one of the first cinematic vampire tales in which the Van Helsing savant does not appear in the midst of these superstitions to rid the land of vampires and rather shows, in a bleak ending, their infestation as a triumph over reason and logic. Memorable images abound: the bobbing decapitated head of Alibeq hanging from the trees; Ivan begging to be allowed in; Sdenka cornered by her own vampirised family in the ruins, floating towards the camera and bathed in a greenish hue.

Bava saves the best until last. 'The Drop of Water' returns us to a similar psychological frontier described in 'The Telephone' and examines another lone female protagonist driven mad by supernatural revenge. It's also one of Bava's most baroque cinematic exercises, with the down at heel setting of the crumbling house of a dead medium populated by mewling cats and dolls, its chipped rococo and mirrored hallways dripping in purple and green light. Bava fans will find its gaudy surrealism a prefiguring of the house in Kill Baby, Kill (1966).

Into this haunted palace comes Helen Chester (Jacqueline Pierreux), an irritated nurse called out late at night to administer to the deceased body of a medium. Temptation gets the better of her and she steals a ring from the corpse's finger. The corpse is, however, rather unwilling to part with it and rises from the dead to claim her belongings. Bava luxuriates in the details, giving objects an unnatural charge with his sickly lighting schemes and not shying away from the bulging eyed, grimacing visage of he corpse who, by the end of the film, has transfered her state to Helen.

'The Drop of Water' conjures up a terrifying, naggingly claustrophobic atmosphere and uses sound to turn up the tension and symbolise the presence of supernatural revenge in the buzzing of flies and the constant, echoing drip of water. Helen's greed and class snobbery underscore her unhealthy nonchalance for the dead until she transgresses and is haunted by the medium, her tatty rooms seemingly rotting on the inside as she descends into paranoia. Pierreux is superb, with Helen at first bored and distracted and by the end terrified out of her wits and condemned to strangle herself.

When the repossession occurs, the corpse glides out of the dark, caught between pink and green highlights, its doll-like state mechanically reaching out for Helen, condemning her for her questionable morals and meting out an apt punishment. 'The Drop of Water' gets under your skin and briefly allows you entrance into a twilight world of decay and retribution, lashed by storms, populated by a corpse that won't lie down and where one woman's conscience is the soundtrack of a dripping tap. Roberto Nicolosi's score is also perfect, a high pitched organ and rumbling drum complimenting the phantasmagoria. 

Bava's black sense of humour also pervades the film and with great charm he closes the three tales with a coda featuring Karloff again, in his Gorca costume and make-up, pulling the camera back to reveal the tricks of the trade, the magician showing up his sleight of hand as we see Karloff astride a dummy horse and technicians running around with branches to simulate the forest through which he was riding. AIP hated this ending, didn't use it in their re-cut of Black Sabbath and toned down the ending of 'The Drop of Water' and the gorier elements of 'The Wurdulak.' Bava might pull the rug from under your feet with his tongue in cheek coda, a clever admission of cinema's ability to create illusions, but it never diminishes the power of the three tales in I tre volti della paura, a film which offers a brilliant display of his talents as director and editor.

About the transfers
The Italian version I tre volti della paura is a very strong presentation and cinematographer Ubaldo Terzano's lush colour palette is well produced from the original 35mm internegative. 'The Drop of Water', in which he floods the image with bold red, pink and green lighting, is particularly opulent, and the 'The Wurdulak' features some gorgeous looking exteriors staged in typically ornate style by Bava in the studio, with ruins plunged into deep blues and greens contrasted with the warm yellows, reds and browns of the cottage interiors. The domestic details of 'The Telephone' are also a visual delight with purples, greens (Mary's outfit is a highlight) and reds standing out. Overall, Bava's and Terzano's mastery of Technicolour really shines. Detail is often very good, particularly in faces, clothes and objects and good contrast, which can often be variable throughout the film, also manages to add depth to the image. The transfer does not appear to have been meddled with as far as grain is concerned, is very clean and the viewing experience is fluid and film-like.

AIP's re-cut and re-scored Black Sabbath, here reproduced from a 35mm interpositive, is inconsistent in the reproduction of such lurid colour and contrast levels are boosted, with the black levels looking deeper. Certainly in 'The Telephone' Rosy's apartment doesn't feel as as warm and the colour density of Mary's green outfit isn't as eye popping. The interiors of 'The Wurdalak' have better shadow definition and again move to a colder colour palette. It's a darker, grainier image overall but detail reproduction is still good. Occasionally, there is softening, blurring, picture instability and some evident damage in the form of scratches and blobs.

Although the packaging declares this to be 1.66:1 it seems more fitting to describe it as a 1.86:1 image and on Black Sabbath it looks as if this has either been slightly stretched horizontally or slightly zoomed in. The LCPM mono audio on both transfers is pretty solid but there is some very occasional hiss and distortion on I tre volti della paura.

Special features:
Audio Commentary with Bava biographer and expert Tim Lucas
Another very welcome chat track from Lucas who provides masses of information about the film, its production, its cast and Bava's own consideration of its themes. He also discusses the changes made by AIP, Karloff's role in the film and his relationship with Bava and the literary inspirations for each of the stories.
Introduction to Black Sabbath (2:53)
Author and critic Alan Jones briefly sets the scene for these three tales of terror. Bava's favourite film apparently and Karloff's last great performance in 'one of the screen's best realised Gothic epics'. It was allegedly so disturbing that AIP cut the film and reordered the tales for its US distribution.
A Life In Film - An Interview with star Mark Damon (21:01)
A lovely retrospective interview, made by Anchor Bay in 2007, wherein Damon takes us from his early days running amusement parks and being approached by Groucho Marx, who thought he had potential to be an actor, to his hugely successful international production career. Groomed by Fox he spent a number of years starring as a juvenile in teenage pictures but after the arrival of James Dean and Marlon Brando that changed. He approached Roger Corman about adapting the Poe books and not only starred in The Fall of the House of Usher but also directed The Pit and the Pendulum. He sought the freedom of working in Italy after being invited to Rome by Visconti and made westerns, sword and sandal and spy films. He allegedly introduced Clint Eastwood to Sergio Leone and, of course, worked with Bava on Black Sabbath.
Twice the Fear (32:13)
A great featurette looking at the differences between the Italian and American International Pictures versions, including the use of alternate takes, different and additional audio tracks, scoring and sound effects and changes in dialogue and editing. This is comprehensively illustrated via split screen and by placing both versions side by side. The Les Baxter music on the first story 'The Telephone' is more prominent, additional shots are featured and an entirely new character is added to the AIP version as is a supernatural element. Mary, the lesbian lover of the Italian version, is retained but all references to her affair with Rosy are excised from the AIP version. In 'The Wurdulak' there are extended scenes, alternate takes, changed lines and boosted audio in the AIP version but the Karloff coda is only present in the Italian version. It's also here that you clearly notice the stretching/zooming on the AIP print too.
International Trailer (3:26)
US Trailer (2:23)
Italian Trailer (3:18)
TV Spot (0:54) and Radio Spot (1:06)
Reversible sleeve
Featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Graham Humphreys.
Collector's booklet
Featuring new writing on the film by critic David Cairns, a comparison of the versions of the film by Tim Lucas, and a substantial and fascinating interview with AIP Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff on his experiences of working with Bava, illustrated with original stills and posters.

I tre volti della paura / Black Sabbath
1963
Emmepi Cinematografica / Galatea Film / Alta Vista Film Production / Societé Cinématographique Lyre / Alta Vista Film Production / American International Pictures

Arrow Video Dual Format Blu-ray and DVD Edition / FCD778 / Released 13 May 2013 / Cert: 15 / 1.86:1 / Colour / High Definition Blu-ray (AVC 1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of two versions of the film: I tre volti della paura (92mins): the European version with score by Roberto Nicolosi and Black Sabbath (96mins): the re-edited and re-dubbed AIP version with Les Baxter score, on home video for the first time / Audio: Optional Italian, European English and AIP English re-dub and re-score LPCM 2.0 / English SDH subtitles for both English versions and a new English subtitle translation of the Italian audio / Region B/2

The Name of the Doctor
BBC One HD
18 May 2013, 7.00pm

The review contains spoilers

The problem with The Name of the Doctor is that, nostalgia and fan service aside, it feels familiar and comes across as an exercise in confirming some already astute guesses about Clara's mystery. The revelation about her is rather anticlimactic when it comes. Let's also get one thing out of the way. Anyone remotely believing the episode would reveal the Doctor's name was on a hiding to nothing. The Doctor's greatest secret isn't his name and I'm sure Moffat understands that, after all the attempts he's made to reinstate mystery into the Doctor's character and origins, an episode where the Doctor tells us his real name would be utterly counterproductive. He will always be Doctor Who?

So what is his greatest secret if it isn't his name? That he's already dead, at least in the physical sense, and what we're watching are the traces of a life already lived? Yes and no. It does seem rather apt given the funereal atmosphere in which The Name of the Doctor unfolds but the big secret is he's been hiding an illegitimate incarnation all these years. There's a mad man in the family attic and John Hurt's playing him.

This isn't a barnstorming, freewheeling, carnivalesque episode in the manner of The Pandorica Opens or The Wedding of River Song and is the polar opposite to the double episode, end of season jamborees of the previous showrunner. It's quite a sombre reflection in the show's 50th anniversary year despite the casual dropping in of other previous incarnations.

Yes, there's a giddy excitement attached to the opening sequence, a typical Moffat usage of in medias res where the narrative's linearity is rearranged to open an episode with action rather than exposition, and where we see Clara stalking the First Doctor, conveniently in Victorian attire rather than what's passing for regulation Gallifrey gear, as he bundles Susan (we assume) into a TARDIS and absconds from Gallifrey. 'Sorry, you're about to make a very big mistake,' Clara warns the old man. It's the best bit in a series of encounters, designed to be a crowd pleasing montage of Clara trying to 'save the Doctor' in the first seven of his incarnations, but which are ultimately hampered by some terrible green screen effects designed to integrate Clara into some of the footage. A lovely idea not quite as well executed as it should have been.

All this is achieved via reconfigured clips (The Invasion of Time, Dragonfire, The Five Doctors, Arc of Infinity) and new footage - the Sixth Doctor out of focus behind Clara in the TARDIS corridors and the Second scuttling off (courtesy of some of The Five Doctors) through a beach front lined with palm trees. So Clara, rather like Scaroth in City of Death, is scattered through time, along the Doctor's own time stream, always 'born to save the Doctor'. Moffat will return to this sequence again later in the episode with some interesting modifications, particularly in the scene with the First Doctor.

First of all is a return to the London of 1893 and Vastra's encounter with a Ripper-style multiple murderer who has somehow been bequeathed with the space-time coordinates of Trenzalore, a planet with the doom laden reputation for 'the fall of the Eleventh' according to Dorium in The Wedding Of River Song. Why a Victorian sociopath, who burbles in rhyming couplets, has been given the privilege of that information is never really explained. 'There are whispers, if you know how to listen,' suggests Clarence (Michael Jenn) picking up the goss through what must be the Victorian equivalent of social media. The self-explanatory DVD extra Clarence and the Whispermen may offer some expansion on his relationship to the Great Intelligence's verse spouting, top hatted undertakers. For now, you just have to accept the criminal is at the centre of the trap.

'to travel where the Doctor ends'

Vastra, alerted to the Doctor's secret which 'he will take to his grave and it is discovered', arranges a conference call, a Victorian form of Skype induced through drugs and a séance that can call up River Song from her afterlife in the library's hard drive. There's a flavour of Mark Gatiss's ripe exploration of the age in The Crimson Horror in this sequence, tapping into the vogue for Spiritualism and the Victorian obsession with ghosts and their ability to transcend time and space and the boundaries between life and death.

If The Name of the Doctor is about anything then death, or the suspension of it, is central and as a ghost story writ large the episode plays with echoes, memories, identities, Otherness, physical and spiritual reconfiguration. The Whispermen, the ghostly avatars of the Great Intelligence, are the marginal and uncanny monsters so typical of Moffat, ectoplasmically haunting both the 'real' world and the drug-induced subconscious realm of the conference.

As Vastra commands, it is a gathering of the women, despite Strax's inclusion as a Sontaran who isn't able to tell girls from boys or vice versa, and their deliberations in a faux TARDIS console room (it has a desktop theme after all) certainly underline how Spiritualism or mediumship was directly connected to female sexuality, identity and authority. The conference call may well be a riff on the table tapping repressions of the 19th century but it also indicates Moffat's desire to both complete River Song's story, to exorcise her phantom presence and offer a coda to her demise in the library, and authenticate Clara's role 'to travel where the Doctor ends'. Basically, they've all been invited to the funeral.

Moffat again calls back to Asylum of the Daleks and Clara as 'soufflé girl' as she tries to perfect the recipe. There is foreshadowing, of course, of Clara's eventual destiny and identity in her declaration of 'This time I will be 'soufflé girl' while she prepares pudding for Artie and Angie. The space and time bending séance can even stretch to posting letters from 1893 and inducing her, via this soporific communication, to drop in on the women's meeting in the altered states of the unconscious, the time travel of dreams.

Like a Méliès illusion, River appears in a puff of smoke, the dangerous femme fatale or witch who can, even in her undead state, manipulate the environment and change tea into champagne. She's become less of an archaeologist and more of a magical figure than ever before in this realm and even Vastra's not averse to sprinkling magic dust in the air to create visions of Clarence and the space-time coordinates for the internment of the Doctor on Trenzalore. For Moffat's fantastical sleight of hand, Clarke's Three Laws are doing overtime because its seems the ghostly River can physically exist enough to slap Vastra and chuck champagne over Strax.

And River's right, 'he doesn't like endings' and the Doctor certainly doesn't want to see the damage. Crossing your own time line and arriving at your own grave on Trenzalore is not something a time traveller does every day. Much of The Name of the Doctor echoes The Five Doctors and its own journey to the Death Zone and the phantom haunted tomb of Rassilon as well as the funereal tone of Logopolis and its suggestion of endings and beginnings. Even as the image of Richard E Grant's Dr. Simeon hovers in the air and intones 'his friends are lost for ever more, unless he goes to Trenzalore', we're not that far away from the old Gallifreyan nursery rhyme 'Who unto Rassilon's Tower will go, must choose above, between, below.'

Rather like The Crimson Horror, it's a full ten minutes into the episode before the Eleventh Doctor makes an appearance proper. The Doctor as myth or legend is central to Moffat's concept of the series, his affect on the universe and its inhabitants crucial to the character's heroic function. Even his physical absence now drives the narrative and this compliments the idea of the self-fulfilling prophecies developed around him and Clara in the episode. The cold hand of death seems to engulf the Doctor when he discusses his dead wife River with Clara. He knows going to Trenzalore is going to be traumatic because it means at some point in the future he will be dead and this appointment means he's literally going to his grave. Early retirement, watercolours and beekeeping never stood a chance.

Perhaps the reason why the TARDIS resents Clara is because she takes the Doctor where he shouldn't go. The ship is certainly reluctant to travel to Trenzalore and Clara has to be telepathically linked to her to programme in the coordinates. Even worse, the TARDIS herself is about to visit the monument to her own death. Like the Doctor, she doesn't ever want to go there and start leaking her dimensions everywhere. But as the Doctor observes, he has to go and save his friends because 'they cared for me during the dark times and never questioned me, judged me, they were just... kind', recalling his withdrawal from life after the departure of the Ponds in The Snowmen. Briefly, we see the humanity beneath the 'lonely god' who dominates the universe.

Dorium was, of course, spouting metaphors. 'The fall of the Eleventh' is surely as much the result of turning off the anti-gravs on a TARDIS and plunging to the surface of Trenzalore as it is the Great Intelligence's vengeful scheme to reverse all of the Doctor's triumphs and victories through a casual bit of grave robbing. Such is the power of the forced landing, one of the TARDIS windows shatters. It's a neat visual note not only to the future TARDIS lying in ruins but also prefigures the Doctor's lives broken into pieces, the Great Intelligence becoming bits of confetti in the process and Clara's rescue attempt that scatters her across all of time and space. 

The Doctor reminds Clara, 'my grave is potentially the most dangerous place in the universe' and the evidence is hard to deny. The TARDIS's own demise has created a vast edifice on the planet surface, where 'the bigger on the inside starts leaking' and has created a monument to the Doctor's final battle and a marker for his grave. The TARDIS has become a variation of the Dark Tower where the passageways are filled with haunting memories, recollections dragged back to the surface by the spilling out of time and dimensions. Moffat can never resist those sleight of hand touches and somehow River Song's grave is marked, an impossibility which just happens to be the secret entrance to his own tomb. Did the Doctor put it there before his own death? How does River really know it is a false grave?

A powerful scene where Vastra implores Strax to help her bring Jenny back from the dead (another example of how Moffat shifts his characters from living to dead and back again - see River, Rory, Strax, Simeon and many others as examples) ushers in the spectres at the feast proper as Dr Simeon and his doppelgangers join the other characters in the shell of the TARDIS sepulchre, beautifully captured by the brief pan up, following Vastra's gaze, to the huge 'police box' sign. However, at this point, the finale starts to emulate the The Big Bang, a series of conversations between foes in a single location as shorthand for 'epic', and Dr Simeon's return as villain is nothing more than an opportunity to reflect the Doctor's importance.

'The girl who died he tries to save, she'll die again inside his grave.' 

Beyond the Time War, Simeon claims the future Doctor is a 'cruel tyrant', a 'vessel of the final darkness', a 'blood soaked' warrior familiar to the Sycorax, Solomon (an acknowledgement of the much discussed Doctor's cold blooded attitudes in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship), the Daleks and the Cybermen. As the Great Intelligence seeks revenge through Dr Simeon, the story takes the morality of the Doctor's actions, his 'darker hues', and extends this into what may be the Doctor's future as 'the Beast', as 'storm' and, most intriguingly, the Valeyard, that evil distillation of the Doctor between his twelfth and final incarnations seen in The Trial of a Time Lord.

Sadly, Simeon only appears in the flesh, as it were, twenty minutes into the episode and then only confronts the Doctor five minutes beyond that. Villains are rather incidental to Moffat's concept and merely underline how central the Doctor is rather than existing as characters in their own right. It's ironic that Simeon and his Whispermen are depicted just as insubstantially as they are written on the page.

Despite this, when Simeon rips his face apart the episode offers us one of its few unsettling moments. A shame really as it is a waste of Grant's talents and the Whispermen, while well executed, are a recognisable riff on the Trickster from The Sarah Jane Adventures or The Gentlemen from Buffy-The Vampire Slayer and probably won't warrant a return. Monsters are not Moffat's real concern.

There's also a striking, genuinely frightening moment when the ghost of River Song is suddenly ripped asunder by one of the Whispermen party chasing the Doctor and Clara through the catacombs of his grave. Clara's statement of 'I hate catacombs' also recalls the Doctor's reaction to similar in Time of Angels. Their journey returns us to The Five Doctors and the hallucinatory forces within the Dark Tower as Clara begins to remember her previous climb through a wrecked TARDIS and the Doctor's revelation to her about the other dead versions of her he's met. Memories, always the prime mover in Moffat's narratives, are unsurprisingly present and correct and the self-fulfilling prophecy of her deaths is underlined by the Whispermen: 'The girl who died he tries to save, she'll die again inside his grave.'

Late to his own funeral, the Doctor refuses to utter his name to open the tomb. Under a heart-stopping threat to the others, it is the ghostly River who relents and telepathically opens the door. The name is uttered but we never hear it and the tease of the title is, of course, subverted by Moffat. However, I did wonder if the telepathic field of the TARDIS is still operating why don't the others hear her send his name too?

And thus we get to the crux of the matter. The Great Intelligence's desire to rewrite all of the Doctor's journeys, to poison the tree in the garden at the centre of the ruined TARDIS, a place echoing with the voices of the past. The Doctor's life is an open wound, a path from 'from Gallifrey to Trenzalore', including the days he hasn't lived yet. And of course, Clara must become 'soufflé girl' and correct the Great Intelligence's action.

We're taken back to the opening, pre-titles sequence. Instead of Clara, we see Dr Simeon shadowing the Doctors and the death of the Eleventh Doctor at the Dalek asylum and in London battling the snowmen. Just as in The Pandorica Opens, the removal of the Doctor from the universe sees the stars going out, again. Any one got a shilling for the meter? On a personal level, it's far more interesting to see how this affects and disintegrates friendships - Jenny vanishes and Strax turns against Vastra.

And of course, Clara must become the self-fulfilling 'soufflé girl' and correct the Great Intelligence's action by saving the Doctor throughout his timeline, a million copies of her created from the sacrifice of the original. The recipe rather than the end product. How exactly she saves him, how he's never seen her in the last 50 years popping up by all his previous incarnations, how he never remembered her before until now and why she exists to do this are the big questions. They don't really get answered.

Will the Restoration Team now kindly go back through the classic series and please insert footage of Clara into every story because, quite honestly, this is a rather contrived way of explaining her mystery and introduces something of a rogue element into the Doctor's history which, for me, doesn't ring true. The mystery is her character and without this what will Clara become? No doubt, the ubiquity of time travel, now as normal as catching the number 17 bus in the series, will sort it all out and Clara's eavesdropping will not matter a jot. 

She stands in front of the First Doctor and tells him which TARDIS to steal, which sort of undoes the gorgeous poetry of Idris's authority in The Doctor's Wife declaring she 'wanted to see the Universe so I stole a Time Lord and I ran away', and Clara's born, lives and dies a thousand times (Rory, you're well off out of it, love). As Clara's story arc folds back on itself, we also get the more satisfying closure of the River song arc. I wonder if Moffat will bring her back again as a ghostly form?

It began all that time ago in the library with 'Hello, sweetie' and now it ends, appropriately with 'Goodbye, sweetie'. It's a great scene between Alex Kingston and Matt Smith which appropriately suggests the Doctor has learned to appreciate the endings River seeks and as a result he's determined to ensure Clara's resurrection. Mind you, we know that she does get rescued. We've seen her in the prequel She Said, He Said that takes place after Trezalore so all this expectation in the narrative is the least surprising thing about it. The big friendly reset button has already been pressed, again.

Finally, the much mooted ending - the so called 'game changer' - which had the BBC with its knickers in a twist when it seemed the episode had leaked early on Blu-ray. I don't know why they were so worried. If you've been following the news stories about the 50th Anniversary filming you'll know full well who it is standing with his back to the camera in that end sequence as Clara tumbles to her safety. 'Introducing John Hurt as the Doctor' is probably going to freak out many viewers I suspect and it's certainly great to see an actor of his calibre in the series and posing another question - just which Doctor is this? - to replace the ones not quite answered in full in The Name of the Doctor.

I could have done without the extras in various Doctor costumes swishing by the camera as Clara recovered from her splintering into a million pieces but clearly anniversary fever demanded it. Just how did the original Clara survive a self-fulfilling time paradox and travelling down the Doctors' time streams without being torn to shreds then? In a not entirely original move, it is purported her faith in the Doctor allows her to survive and the symbolic leaf, the first page of Clara's story and the emblem of rebirth from a million deaths conjured up by the Doctor as he searches for her, provides her with the impetus.

The Name of the Doctor serves the cast well. The return of the Paternoster gang is welcome and fortunately their trials leave them intact for future appearances. Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman are good and transform all the standard Moffat tropes into something which does have its gripping moments. Director Saul Metzstein shows how capable he is with his visuals and considering he had only a handful of sets to shoot on he makes the production values go a long way in a what is quite a low key episode.

For me the weakness is Moffat's script. I feel like I've seen variations of it many times before and it trots out the same old time paradoxes and self-fulfilling prophecies we've had since 2010 to such an extent that the series is in danger of falling into a rut if they continue to be employed. Although it's been a patchy season the best episodes this year have definitely come from other writers. The Name of the Doctor is neither new nor surprising in the Moffat canon.

Baron Blood (1972) marked the true beginning of Mario Bava's fruitful partnership with producer Alfred Leone. Leone, who was a successful self-made business man through his real estate deals and investments, moved into television production in the mid-1950s and steadily invested in and produced television series and films in Italy and internationally.

As B&L productions, he snapped up the rights to Italian films and then sold them to other distributors, including American International Pictures, but would also keep his hand in real estate development, later investing in properties in North Beach, Florida with prominent financier turned film producer David. B Putnam. AIP would have a greater influence over Bava and Leone's work in the early 1960s and through into the mid-1970s but it was during Putnam's ill-feted production of 1968's Four Times That Night (AKA Quante Volte... quella notte) that Leone was first impressed by Bava.

The production of the film was in difficulty and Putnam asked Leone to step in and resolve the issues with the Italian film company Delfino Films. Leone was persuaded to take over production on the Rashomon-inspired sex farce and hired Bava, of whose reputation he had limited knowledge at the time. He particularly admired the way the director managed to boost the production values of a film made on a very small budget. 'Bava and I became good friends by the end of the production of Four Times. Earning his respect did not come easily, however; having proved myself on the set and off was the result. Bava was not excited about Baron Blood or other projects at the time, and it took a great deal of time and patience to convince him to do Baron Blood.' (1)

Joining the re-publication of Peter Cushing - The Complete Memoirs on book shelves to celebrate the centenary of the much-loved actor's birth this month is the extraordinary collection The Peter Cushing Scrapbook. A beautiful A4 landscape soft bound book in full colour, this 328 page treasure trove is only available direct from Peveril Publishing and is an overwhelmingly lovely and exhaustive pictorial history of Peter Cushing's life and career.

Wayne Kinsey, a highly respected Hammer Films researcher, historian and author of many detailed books about the studio (Hammer Films – the Bray Studios Years, The Elstree Studios Years, A Life in Pictures, the Unsung Heroes and On Location), and fantasy films historian and author Tom Johnson  (Hammer Films – an Exhaustive Filmography, Peter Cushing – the Gentle Man of Horror and his 91 Films and The Films of Oliver Reed) collaborated with Joyce Broughton (Cushing’s faithful secretary and aide for over 35 years) to compile this definitive, essential book.

Not only does it chronicle in depth the actor's work on stage, television and in the cinema but it also explores his superb talents as a watercolor artist and cartoonist, his hobbies as a model theatre builder and his work as a silk scarf and jewellery designer. It brings together unseen materials from Joyce's own collection as well as rare pieces from director Roy Ward Baker's estate and a wide range of items from familiar names including writers, historians, documentarians and collectors Marcus Hearn, Denis Meikle, Don Fearney, Stephen Jones, Uwe Sommerlad, Simon Greetham, Christopher Gullo and Richard Golen among many others.

Nightmare in Silver
BBC One HD
11 May 2013, 7.00pm

The review contains spoilers.

It has to be said, the expectations for another Neil Gaiman-penned episode of Doctor Who have been exceptionally high. I think the pressure to perform, certainly after the award winning success of the very popular The Doctor's Wife nearly two years ago, can be detected in the interview with Gaiman in this week's Radio Times. He confesses "It has a few little scary bits" and, judging it on marks out of ten, "It’s running at about a five or a six. I’d love to do a nine. I’d love to do something that sends adults behind the sofa, too." Well, about five or six is an apt summation of Nightmare in Silver's remit to make the Cybermen, last seen skulking beneath a department store threatening James Corden's baby, properly scary again.

Being a Neil Gaiman script there is, however, more to Nightmare in Silver than vicarious scares and not only does the story tap into the ever-evolving history of the Cybermen and the accompanying anxieties about a posthuman future where potentially our biology is transformed by artificial intelligence and wearable or implanted technologies, but it also explores the Romantic legacy of the stories of E.T.A Hoffman and Shelley's Frankenstein, musing on the responsibilities that come with the use of power, self-sacrifice and chess strategies.

‘You’re being a very stupid woman’
‘That isn’t a very original observation’

Enter Eric Saward, if you'll pardon the expression.

Christopher Bidmead, the then current script editor of Doctor Who, was on the look out for new writers and a senior drama script editor at BBC Radio recommended former schoolteacher Saward, having worked with him on a number of radio plays on Radio 4's Saturday Night Theatre.

His writing career stretched back to the 1960s, with his first radio play The Shelter, submitted to BBC Radio in 1965, followed by a series of thrillers including 1972's The Fall and Fall of David Moore, Circumstantial Evidence in 1974 and Small Monet in 1976. Saward had previously never written for television but he was invited by Bidmead to submit an outline for a story in the Spring of 1980.

His inspiration for what was then titled The Invasion of the Plague Men derived from the academic studies of a former girlfriend. She had been looking at the architecture of the rebuilt London in the post-Great Fire of London period and noted how, within months of the Fire, there was an almost total extinction of the infected flea-carrying black rats which had caused an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1665, killing about 15% of London's population.

Combining this background with a desire to explore his own interest in medieval England, he also saw it as an opportunity to use his character of Richard Mace, transposing the actor-manager of his 1880s set radio plays to the 17th century. 'Victorian actor, detective, drunk and master of disguise' Mace assisted the London police in five plays: Assassin (broadcast in Radio 4's Afternoon Theatre strand in 1974), Pegasus (1975), the unproduced plays The Arch Villain and The Professor, and The Nemesis Machine, transmitted in 1976. (1)