Black Sabbath, the West Midlands, and Hammer: Rupert Russell on witchcraft’s ties to the birth of heavy metal
Recently, Far Out Magazine spoke to filmmaker Rupert Russell about his documentary The Last Sacrifice. That excellent film follows the real-life murder that inspired The Wicker Man while weaving in a history of folk horror films and Britain’s history with witchcraft. Russell revealed, though, that while making the doc, the story he was telling had countless tendrils and offshoots that were equally fascinating to him. He started to become interested in other avenues that his true crime/folk horror documentary could only touch upon but ultimately have to leave behind. It left him itching to make further docs on the US Satanic Panic in the 1980s, as well as something much closer to home.
“There’s another version of this that is fascinating, and what I want to make this film on is that the West Midlands was the birth of heavy metal in the late ’60s and early ’70s,” Russell mused. “Black Sabbath is named after a film, right? I think it’s 1968 or 1966, Black Sabbath, the film. And that’s kind of where Ozzy gets the idea from.”
Indeed, Russell is correct in that Black Sabbath’s band name was inspired by a horror film – although it wasn’t a Hammer endeavour. Instead, it was the 1963 Italian movie The Three Faces of Fear, released in English-speaking territories as Black Sabbath. It was directed by Mario Bava, who would later be credited as a pioneer of the Italian Giallo horror genre.
However, Hammer Horror, the classic British film studio behind films like The Devil Rides Out, The Plague of the Zombies, and The Witches, was certainly instrumental in inspiring young musicians from the West Midlands like Ozzy Osbourne and Tommy Iommi of Sabbath. Russell believes it is all to do with places like Birmingham and Warwickshire being “saturated in folklore”. In fact, the site of the Charles Walton murder detailed in The Last Sacrifice is on Meon Hill. This mysterious plateau looms over the villages of Lower Quinton, Mickleton and Ilmington in Warwickshire and has long been synonymous with witchcraft.
Russell continued, “It’s always been a kind of witchy part of the country. It’s where a lot of these heavy metal bands like Judas Priest and Black Sabbath come from. I mean, Ozzy Osbourne says he was going to watch Hammer Horror films and thinking, ‘Why isn’t anyone doing this for music?’ So, the crossover there is very explicit.”
As a perfect example of how all these topics are roiling around in the consciousness together, Russell was also fascinated by the connection between bands like Black Sabbath and the Satanic Panic. “Rock comes in in the early ’80s, and a lot of that rock is coming from the UK,” Russell explained. “They’ve been bubbling around in the ’70s, as I said, from Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and others. And it hits Reagan, and it hits the rise of the evangelical explosion in the early 1980s, and hilarity ensues.”
This “hilarity” happened, according to Russell, because British people – and the bands who used the Occult and Satanism as part of their act – tended to have their tongues firmly in their cheeks. They didn’t take any of it overly seriously, and for bands like Black Sabbath, it was mostly fun window-dressing to drum up some controversy and give them a unique selling point.
As Osbourne admitted in his memoir I Am Ozzy, he was shocked when he discovered there really were people out there who worshipped Satan – and also loved his band. “These freaks with white make-up and black robes would come up to us after our gigs and invite us to black masses at Highgate Cemetery in London,” Osbourne wrote. “I’d say to them, ‘Look, mate, the only evil spirits I’m interested in are called whisky, vodka, and gin.’
Iommi also told Mojo magazine in 2013 that the connection between Sabbath and witchcraft was always just part of the show. In fact, he was horrified when, “Suddenly, we had all these crazy people turning up at shows. I think Alex Sanders (high priest of the Wiccan religion) turned up at a gig once. It was all quite strange, really.”
By the time bands like Sabbath tried to break America, though, they realised that not everyone approaches the Devil as a lark. “You’ve got these Brits, who have a very ironic relationship to this, coming up against uber-sincere Americans,” Russell laughed. “And it’s incredibly funny when you watch the interviews, and it’s people like Geraldo Rivera interviewing Ozzy Osbourne going, ‘Ozzy, why are you telling young kids to worship and conjure the devil?’ And Ozzy goes, ‘I can’t even conjure myself out of bed in the morning, let alone the devil.’ It is brilliant.”
Will Russell get to make his documentary on Sabbath, Hammer Horror, and the witchy part of the country he hails from? Only time will tell – but we certainly hope so.
