"A body like yours can drive a man to madness. And I will kill you."

Netflix just dropped a new season of Black Mirror, and I still haven't finished the first three yet. I've seen a few episodes from each season. I like what I've seen and recommend it highly, even if my experience is limited. It's an anthology series about the potential nightmares posed by new and emerging technologies. It's good. The first one is about a guy who kidnaps a princess and demands the prime minister fuck a pig on YouTube in exchange for her safe return. There's a really smart one where people have an app and they constantly rate each other, and your rating is practically credit. If you average at least 3.6 stars and have some 3.8s to give you a good reference, you can get in to some nice apartments, but if you lash out at an ineffectual airline employee and hold up the line, the consequences can be dire.

But what about old technology?

Consider the landline telephone. For most of the 20th century, you had no idea who was calling without some significant police work, and if the caller had been inside your home, they would know exactly where you stood when you were talking to them.

So much the better to position their telephone, so they might peek in your window at you as they called.

Creepy, huh?

This week's Thursday Thriller is Black Sabbath.

This 1963 Mario Bava film stars the stunning Michele Mercier as Rosy, a gal just trying to slip into something more comfortable, when she starts receiving death threats by telephone. What I like about Italians, Bava, in particular, is the undercurrent of eroticism prevalent in their horror. Mercier leaves plenty to the imagination, but watching her take off her stockings can also leave you plenty of fuel.

This segment, entitled "The Telephone," is the earliest I can remember in which a phone is used as a tool of menace, long before Black Christmas, When a Stranger Calls, and Scream.

Black Sabbath is an anthology film in which Boris Karloff plays the emcee. He opens the film wearing a simple suit and stands on a rocky horizon against a backdrop of flashing, psychedelic colors.  I think this is how you know you're watching the Italian version. In the American version, he appears as a floating, color-changing, disembodied head. Either way, he makes some corny remarks about vampires going to the movies before introducing the Mercier segment.

Karloff returns later in the film in "The Werdulak," which is a kind of vampire. A Russian nobleman finds a dagger stuck in a headless body while he is out for a ride on his horse. He stops into a nearby house and the family insists he leave before Father (Karloff) gets home, for he went off to kill the monster who's been terrorizing  the countryside, and if he does not return by midnight he is surely a werdulak as well.

Wouldn't you know Dad ambled up the driveway just as the clock strikes 12? He wasn't in the house yet, so did he make it or didn't he? He seems all right enough. He has the werdulak's head in a bag after all, and orders it hung from a post as a warning to any others, like you do, but he seems awfully agitated by the dogs barking. How can you be sure?

Will it help when he carries off his own grandson into the forest in the dead of night? Yeah, that'll clear up any doubt you might have had.

The third bit is a decent ghost story with a cartoonishly fun-looking corpse and a stolen ring.

Black Sabbath is a classic, with sexy women and Karloff looking even creepier than he did in Frankenstein. It streams on Shudder.