Paul A J Lewis

Rooms filled with mannequins; characters who are living people one minute and dolls the next; a mechanical music box that features six figurines rotating around one another in a never-ending cycle; a Gothic drama in which characters are destined to replay the past; a young woman lost in an eerie, dreamlike otherworld. These are the core components of Mario Bava’s haunting Lisa and the Devil (Lisa e il diavolo, 1973). It is a picture with a checkered postproduction period and distribution history, and one whose thesis on the malign influence of the Devil over the lives of the living feels both rooted in its immediate cultural context (reflecting Pope Paul VI’s then-recent assertions about the nature of evil) and strikingly relevant to today.

Often cited as the last gasp of the Italian Gothic horror filone, Mario Bava’s enigmatic Lisa and the Devil was drastically re-edited by its producer, Alfredo Leone, in an attempt to capitalise on the popularity during the early 1970s of films about diabolical possession. In Catholic countries particularly, the release of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) inspired a slew of imitators. After failing to sell Lisa and the Devil to American International Pictures, who had distributed a number of Bava’s previous films in the US, Leone commissioned extensive reshoots, building a new narrative modelled on The Exorcist.

In this version, tourist Lisa Reiner (Elke Sommer) collapses after viewing a medieval fresco that depicts the Devil (Telly Savalas) carrying the souls of the dead to hell. She awakens in a hospital, a victim of diabolical possession. Retitling the picture House of Exorcism (La casa dell’esorcismo), Leone worked predictable beats from the Friedkin film into the plot: the vomiting of pea soup, a protracted exorcism conducted by a doubting priest (Robert Alda), and lashings of blasphemous dialogue (“There’s your fucking daily bread”).

The reworking of Italian horror auteur Bava’s mysterious Gothic narrative into a tacky Hollywood imitation is emblematic of how, during the mid-1970s, Italian genre films based on Hollywood models were seen as polluting the work of the genre-auteurs associated with 1960s Eurocult cinema. Roberto Curti has asserted that

the sad destiny of Lisa e il diavolo, reedited and altered in order to become some sort of The Exorcist rip-off, illustrates the mocking decadence of Italian Gothic, absorbed and overwhelmed by its smarter twin, the demonic thread. … [T]he stories drew from contemporaneous American horror cinema, and bastardized their sources. (Curti 3)

The Italian diabolical possession cycle thus came to symbolize a pollution of a mode of filmmaking often praised for its very difference from Hollywood horror films (Lewis 178).

By contrast, Mario Bava’s original cut of Lisa and the Devil is a much more enigmatic picture, with a narrative that focuses on a young woman in a strange otherworld, inviting comparisons with Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Herk Harvey’s Carnival of Souls (1962), and Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil (1973).

The ‘Devil’s dollhouse’

Bava’s cut opens with Lisa becoming lost in Toledo, Spain, after seeing a fresco in which the Devil is depicted with a bald head and pointed ears. Wandering into an oddities shop, Lisa sees a craftsman working on a life-size mannequin under the direction of a man (Telly Savalas) who bears a strong resemblance to the fresco’s Devil. Fleeing, Lisa runs into another man, Carlo (Espertaco Santoni), who addresses her as Elena. Panicked by the similarity between Carlo and the mannequin, Lisa pushes Carlo, and he tumbles down a flight of stone steps to his death.

Terrified, Lisa is offered a lift by a wealthy couple, Sophia (Sylvia Koscina) and Francis Lehar (Eduardo Fajardo), and their chauffeur George (Gabriele Tinti). The Lehar’s Rolls Royce breaks down outside a villa owned by a Contessa (Alida Valli) and her son Maximilian (Alessio Orano). Lisa immediately recognises the Contessa’s manservant, Leandro, as the man whose resemblance to the Devil frightened her when she wandered into the oddities shop.

The sheer volume of clones of The Exorcist made in Italy during the 1970s may be seen as a response not just to Friedkin’s film but also to Pope Paul VI’s 1972 assertion that the Devil should be interpreted as an ontological reality rather than a symbolic construct. On November 15, 1972, Pope Paul VI delivered a speech asserting, “Evil is no longer just a deficiency, but an efficiency, a living being, spiritual, perverted and perverting. A terrible reality. Mysterious and fearful” (Paulus PP. VI). In other words, the Devil is not simply a symbol but “a living being” with a sense of agency, a “terrible reality.”

Where other films focus on the Devil as an ethereal possessing force, Bava’s original cut of Lisa and the Devil depicts the Devil as a deeply corporeal entity, more in line with the “living being” suggested by Pope Paul VI. The Devil takes the form of Leandro, the Contessa’s “lowly” butler who is revealed to be the orchestrator of the chamber piece that unfolds within the villa. He manipulates the characters like a puppet master, directing their actions in a manner that leaves them no room for free will. They become trapped within a drama that replays the past, their actions pre-determined. Characters are alive one minute and mannequins the next; Leandro toys with them in what is essentially the Devil’s dollhouse. He is played with sardonic wit and no small dose of charisma by the Greek-American actor Telly Savalas, in the same year that Savalas would introduce his most lasting character, the television detective Theophilus Kojak.

The medieval fresco Lisa encounters is described by Lisa’s tour guide as depicting “the Devil carrying off the dead,” and with an expression that communicates a “pleasure in evil.” This image foreshadows the many instances later in the film in which we see Leandro carrying his mannequins. It finds its closest visual echo in the scene when Lisa, fleeing the shop, is seemingly pursued by Leandro carrying the Carlo-mannequin. In one shot, Leandro is shown carrying the Carlo-mannequin, and, following a cutaway to Lisa, Bava cuts back to Leandro holding the actor who plays Carlo, Espertaco Santoni. Diabolical laughter echoes on the soundtrack; previously bustling streets are strangely empty. Lisa has slipped into another reality, one that later events suggest is scripted and directed by the Devil.

Arriving at the villa, Lisa and the Lehars become trapped. “Very little escapes me, if you know what I mean,” Leandro tells Lisa as he shows the guests the cottage, on the grounds of the villa, where they have been invited to stay. This line of dialogue is imbued with more than one meaning: Leandro is suggesting he is omniscient but also implying that Lisa and her traveling companions will find it impossible to escape. A strange drama subsequently unfolds. Sophia and George make passionate love, while Francis is impotent (or unwilling) to intervene. Max makes romantic overtures towards Lisa, much to the chagrin of the Contessa. The villa itself becomes a liminal space defined by a sense of “inbetween-ness” in terms of time and place. The costumes of the other characters, and the villa’s décor, speaks of the past and contrasts with Lisa’s modish appearance. Whilst the ground floor of the villa is decorated opulently, the upper floors are labyrinthine and decaying. The characters within the film acknowledge the strange atmosphere, Sophia noting that “The entire setting is so ripe for a tall tale of gloom and perdition. It’s all so spooky.”

Adding to the dreamlike nature of the picture, characters seem to segue between life (or something like it) and their status as mannequins. (There are scenes which feature genuine and highly detailed mannequins, and at other times the mannequins are played by the actors in heavy makeup, designed to make their skin appear wax-like.) Lisa sees the Carlo-mannequin being repaired in the shop, then accidentally causes the real Carlo’s death; on her first night in the villa, she sees the Carlo-mannequin again, being carried by Leandro. “The villa’s full of them,” Max tells her, referring to the mannequins, “They’re harmless.”

Exploring the grounds of the villa during the evening, Lisa is grabbed by the real Carlo (who is mysteriously “alive”). Carlo silences Lisa as they watch Leandro lug the Carlo-mannequin into a building. The imagery again echoes the fresco’s depiction of the Devil carrying the dead. Carlo leaves; some time passes, and Lisa approaches the building. Spying through a window, she watches in horror as Leandro places the Carlo-mannequin in a coffin and, with a loud crack, folds its legs so that the body fits the casket. Because the actor Espertaco Santoni is shown in the coffin, the viewer shares Lisa’s perception that Leandro has broken the legs of Carlo’s corpse. When Carlo, again very much alive, reappears to Lisa and addresses her as Elena, she screams and runs back to the villa.

Upstairs, Lisa finds herself in a room filled with mannequins, all dressed in various costumes. Suddenly, Carlo steps out from amongst them. The shock causes Lisa to faint. Carlo leans over her but is bludgeoned to death by an unseen assailant. Later, we see Leandro tending to the Carlo-mannequin, using glue to repair the damage done to its face. When these characters are killed, it seems, they revert back to their status as mannequins. Putting the Carlo-mannequin back together for a mock funeral, Leandro complains about this “tradition.” “What does tradition mean for a poor devil like me?” he says. “Work and fatigue, that’s my inheritance. They break, they snap, they pop, they crackle. And I’m the one who puts their ‘tradition’ back together again.”

Doll or human?

This confusion of person and mannequin is extended into a confusion of identity. Both Max and Carlo address Lisa as “Elena,” and the film gradually reveals that Elena was both Carlo’s lover and the object of Max’s desire. The film suggests that Lisa is Elena, who is played in flashbacks by Elke Sommer, or perhaps was Elena in a previous existence. Max keeps Elena’s skeletonised corpse in a four-poster bed in one of the upper rooms of the villa. In one scene near the end of the film, Max uses ether to render Lisa unconscious before raping her on the bed next to Elena’s skeleton, Bava’s camera racking focus from Elena’s skull to Lisa, visually fusing the identities of these two women.

Leandro speaks to his mannequins, calling them “dummies.” His use of this label carries two meanings: on a superficial level, Leandro is addressing the mannequins as models or replicas, but he is also using the label “dummy” in a pejorative sense, suggesting that the characters are fools or idiots. “You’re a dummy, that’s what you are,” Leandro says to the Carlo-mannequin as he carries it through the streets of Toledo. (At this point it’s unclear whether he is speaking to the mannequin or to the fleeing Lisa.)

At the film’s climax, almost all of the characters have been killed, the giallo-like murders committed for the most part by an unseen assailant. Whilst Lisa is still under the effects of the ether, Max wanders into the dining room of the villa and, there, he finds the corpses of Sophia, George, Francis, and Elena’s skeleton all seated at the table. Their eyes are open and glassy; their skin has a wax-like pallor. Max is confronted by his mother, the Contessa, whom he had previously murdered with a fire poker. The Contessa advances upon Max, and stepping backwards he tumbles through a window. The Contessa moves aside to reveal she is being “operated” like a puppet by Leandro.

Leandro leans out of the window to look at the shattered body of Maximilian, another broken doll in his collection. “Oh, it slipped,” Leandro asserts with mock surprise, his use of the inanimate pronoun stripping Max of his humanity and reinforcing his status as one of the Devil’s dolls. Later, Lisa awakens from her stupor and finds the villa overgrown with flora, as if it has been abandoned for a very long time. Outside, she finds the Max-mannequin lying beneath the window, another broken toy.

The actions of these characters are clearly orchestrated by Leandro (or the Devil), who despite his “lowly” status as a servant stands apart from the action, often commenting on it sardonically. The viewer may be reminded of Sartre’s No Exit (1944) or Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921). Leandro’s manipulation of the characters and his staging of various scenes (using mannequins that sometimes resemble corpses) parodies the notion of free will. There is a sense of diabolic determinism, of fate being influenced by evil and destinies pre-determined by the “perverted and perverting” power of the Devil incarnate.

‘Diabolical determinism’

The notion that these characters are trapped in a deterministic cycle of events finds its visual metaphor in a music box that reappears throughout the film. The music box features six figurines on a rotating platform, doomed to circle around one another endlessly and without purpose. The music box is a clockwork device, though later in the film Leandro reveals that its chimes are produced through a modern tape recorder concealed within its base. In one scene, Lisa becomes transfixed by this music box, and it provokes within her a reverie in which she imagines (or remembers from a previous existence) herself as Elena, making love with Carlo in a room surrounded by the wax heads of Leandro’s mannequins.

In the final sequence, Lisa, having fled the villa, finds her way onto a passenger plane, hoping to return to her home country. The plane, however, is strangely empty, and Lisa makes her way to the pilot’s cabin. There, she is shocked when the door opens to reveal . . . Leandro. Dressed as a pilot, he smiles enigmatically. Lisa collapses to the floor like a marionette whose strings have been cut, her modish 1970s clothing and haircut replaced with the hairstyle and robes of Elena.

The opening shot of the film is a portrait of Leandro with blazing red eyes – and from the first frame to the last the characters are held in that Devil’s gaze, dummies to be manipulated in the service of a predetermined fate. Lisa and the Devil is a haunting, mysterious picture, a sense of profound fatalism hanging over the narrative. The constant confusion of living characters with mannequins suggests we are all playthings in the dollhouse of the Devil. Much more playfully and directly than the possession cycle it was forced to imitate, Bava’s film reflects on the ontological reality of evil, a reality where we may be toyed with like puppets, our destinies scripted as part of some diabolical drama.

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Works Cited 

Curti, Roberto. Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970–1979. McFarland, 2017.

Lewis, Paul A J. “House of Exorcism: Possession, Exorcism, and the Family in Eurocult Films, 1974–1979.” Supernatural Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2023, pp. 167–89.

Lisa and the Devil. Directed by Mario Bava, Euro America Produzioni Cinematografiche, 1974.

Paulus PP. VI. “Audientia Generalis,” 15 November 1972. Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. 64, 1972, pp. 703–7.