General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Lisa and the Devil

Lisa and the Devil (Lisa e il diavolo) is a 1973 Italian horror film directed by Mario Bava, in which an American tourist in Toledo is drawn into a decaying villa held in the supernatural grip of an enigmatic butler, Leandro, whose face matches the Devil of an ancient fresco she has just seen.¹ It runs 95 minutes and was made as a co-production of Italy, West Germany, and Spain.¹ The film failed to find distribution after its 1973 Cannes market screening and was re-edited in 1975 into The House of Exorcism, a possession film with newly shot scenes that Bava disowned; his original cut later became a cult favorite.²^•³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writers	Directed by Mario Bava; screenplay credited to Bava and producer Alfredo Leone, with Romano Migliorini, Roberto Natale, Giorgio Maulini, and Francesca Rusishka uncredited⁴
Principal cast	Telly Savalas (Leandro), Elke Sommer (Lisa Reiner/Elena), Sylva Koscina, Alida Valli, Alessio Orano, Gabriele Tinti, Eduardo Fajardo⁵
Production	Italy, West Germany, Spain; 95 minutes; cinematography by Cecilio Paniagua; music by Carlo Savina¹
Cannes screening	Shown at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival market; no distributor was secured and Leone stood to lose more than $1 million²
Re-edited version	Released in 1975 as The House of Exorcism (La casa dell'esorcismo), with new possession scenes shot under protest by Bava³
Release dates	France 9 May 1973; Spain 25 November 1974; Italy 2 April 1975; Sweden 8 December 1976; Finland 4 July 1980¹
Late availability	Bava's original version reached DVD only in 2004, more than thirty years after it was made⁶

Spoilers

Plot and style

Lisa Reiner (Elke Sommer) is a tourist in Toledo who is struck by a partially preserved twelfth-century fresco known as "the Devil carrying away the dead." Local superstition holds that the surviving section is preserved by the Devil's own power, and his face is that of Leandro (Telly Savalas). Drawn by a music box topped with rotating figurines, including a reaper and a veiled bride, Lisa enters an antiques shop where Leandro handles a mannequin with human features, then loses her way and takes shelter in a derelict villa.⁷^•¹

The villa holds a dysfunctional, out-of-time family: a blind Countess (Alida Valli), her troubled son Maximilian (Alessio Orano), and the omnipresent butler Leandro, who administers the household like a puppeteer. The narrative mixes flashbacks from past lives, eloping lovers, adultery, murders of passion, and deceptive appearances, with necrophilia and matricide at its center.³ Critics have described the film as a ghost story in which who is or is not a ghost remains unclear, and as a doppelganger tale built on the recurring Bava themes of the love-death dialectic and the double confused with psychic instability.⁷^•⁸

Mannequins and dolls run through the film as a controlling image: rooms filled with mannequins, characters who seem living one moment and doll-like the next, and a music box whose six figurines rotate around one another in a never-ending cycle. The opening shot is a portrait of Leandro with blazing red eyes, and the constant confusion of living characters with mannequins supports the film's thesis that the characters are playthings in the Devil's dollhouse, their destinies scripted in advance.⁹ Carlo Savina's score, with vocalizations by Edda Dell'Orso, uses recurring cues that hold the fractured narrative together.³^•⁷

Production

After the commercial success of Baron Blood (1972), the Brooklyn-born producer Alfredo Leone gave Bava, then in his late 50s, carte blanche to take on any project of his choosing. According to the Bava scholar Tim Lucas, "Bava looked upon Lisa and the Devil as his last chance to make a name for himself as a serious director."³ Bava shot the film in late 1972 between Spain (Toledo) and Italy.⁶ Besides Bava and Leone, the writing involved Roberto Natale and Romano Migliorini, who had previously written Kill, Baby... Kill! for the director, as well as Giorgio Maulini and Francesca Rusishka, to whom the original idea is attributed.⁴^•⁶ The film carried at least two earlier titles during production, La casa del diavolo and Il diavolo e i morti (the latter also listed as a working title in festival data).⁶^•¹

Distribution failure and The House of Exorcism

The film screened at Cannes in 1973, but no distributor took it, and Leone stood to lose more than $1 million.² After a minimal release in Spain under the title El diablo se lleva a los muertos, Leone re-cut the film and added new footage to capitalize on the success of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973). The re-edited The House of Exorcism was released in 1975; Bava shot the newly inserted scenes under protest and disowned the film.³ The new sequences, directed by Alfredo Leone with some involvement from Mario Bava, recast the protagonist as a possessed woman who relives the story in flashback, and the insertions destroyed the supernatural atmosphere of the original.⁶^•¹³ Leone and Bava later reconciled, and Bava's name was restored to Italian prints in place of Leone's pseudonymous director credit, Mickey Lion.¹⁰

The original circulated little and poorly in Europe, remaining unreleased theatrically in Italy, while in America it appeared only on television circuits.⁶ The original cut reached home video decades later and is now generally considered by critics one of Bava's most diverse and fascinating works.³^•¹⁰

Legacy

The film is often cited as the last gasp of the Italian Gothic horror cycle, made at a moment when the genre had already been overtaken by the giallo (Italian genre of stylized murder-mystery thrillers) and the urban thriller.⁹^•⁶ A widely repeated anecdote holds that Savalas was first seen here with the lollipop that became his trademark as television's Kojak, supposedly on Bava's suggestion as a way to help the actor quit smoking.² The film has since received multiple Blu-ray editions from Kino Lorber, Arrow Video, Koch Media, and Scream Factory, with commentaries by Tim Lucas and others, and a new restoration has circulated in repertory screenings.¹¹^•¹²

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Gothic horror films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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