this NIGHT GALLERY episode, looks and sounds to me like a Mario Bava tribute. Has anyone seen it? It could easily be a fourth story in BLACK SABBATH

Royal Dano is an ill man living on the moors (I think). While he's busy dying, his wife is having an affair with John Saxon. Well, the good wife wants to speed up her old hubby's death and she has a witch make a wooden doll in his image so she can hurry him on his way to the grave.
This episode has it all, a creepy little doll, John Saxon with a beard that is wearing him, Bava like music and atmosphere, and well Royal Dano being Royal Dano.

NG is a highly uneven show in my experience, but this story was good. It starts off a big slow, but gets good soon enough. The whole run of the show needs to be on DVD. The three seasons should have just been released as a set seeing as there were only forty something episodes produced.

Who wrote it and who directed?

Daniel Haller directed, and it was written by Jack Laird, adapted from a short story by Rene Morris.

Ah - keep in mind then that Daniel Haller was production designer/art director on Corman's Poe films, and there was more than a little 'conversation' going on between AIP and the burgeoning Italian horror film industry in developing visual tropes for use in one another's films.

Bava, of course would have been a prime voice in the crosstalk, as would Haller.

After I really looked at Haller's IMDB page, seeing he was production designer on all those Corman Poe films that made sense. The episode is really cool, it was on CHILLER today. Damnit not having a tivo or any such device.