Mario Bava is at his day-glo best for this essential Italian horror anthology. This film gives you an eyeful of the walking dead, the gloomy countryside, the menacing city, frightened women, insane men, big blankets of fog, frame compositions that look like paintings and unreal color that jumps off the screen and chews on your living room rug. All three stories here are strong little chillers, but nobody ever looks away from it in fear. It’s too beautiful. You can’t miss Bava’s eerie greens, mysterious purples, fleshy yellows, sensual reds and bizarre blues. Its best freaky visual though is the old dead woman who’s clearly some fake plastic monstrosity created by the special effects crew. Most other directors would have merely hired an actress and made her up to look like someone who’s been flatlining for awhile now, but not Bava. He took the crazy man’s route, God bless him, and made her a synthetic post-mortem monster (not even death is truly comforting here) with cartoonish bug-eyes and a mouth open like it could be either screaming or laughing. When this beast rises from the grave, it’s no surprise. We freak out over it anyway, because Bava’s that good. Perfect Halloween viewing here. It even features Boris Karloff, in the middle story, playing an old coot who’s mysteriously disappeared from his family for a few days and who, upon return, may or may not be a Wurdulak. A Wurdulak is Alexey K. Tolstoy’s Russian vampire variation that feeds on loved ones.