Lisa and the Devil

• After Baron Blood (1972) made money, producer Alfredo Leone handed Bava near-total creative control on the follow-up and told him to make whatever he wanted. It was the first time in his career Bava got that kind of carte blanche, and he poured himself into it as his most personal project.
• The film opens in Toledo, Spain, on a real medieval-style fresco of the Devil carrying off the dead during a plague. In the film the guide explains most of the mural has crumbled away over the centuries, and superstition holds that the surviving fragment is kept intact by the Devil's own vanity, the exact opposite of looking freshly painted.
• Bava originally wanted Bette Davis as the Countess and Anthony Perkins as her son; both turned him down, and the roles went to Alida Valli and Alessio Orano. The Devil of the fresco is deliberately designed to look like Telly Savalas, so Lisa keeps seeing that painted face superimposed over the bald manservant Leandro.
• Savalas plays Leandro sucking a lollipop, the same gimmick that became his trademark as TV detective Kojak. But the lollipop actually debuted later, in the Kojak series episode 'Dark Sunday' (Dec 12, 1973), not the March 1973 pilot, so the prop showed up in Bava's film right around the time Savalas started chewing on it for the role that made him famous.
• The film screened at the Cannes film market on May 9, 1973, and found no buyers; its dream-logic structure spooked distributors, and it sat unsold with no one willing to release it.
• Desperate to recoup, Leone re-shot and re-cut the picture into an Exorcist knockoff, adding footage of Robert Alda as a priest performing an exorcism on a possessed Lisa and burying Bava's original as flashbacks. That 1975 version, The House of Exorcism, was savaged by critics but actually turned a profit, enough that Bava asked to have his name put back on it.

The whole villa is Lisa's afterlife, or her own death playing on a loop. She enters right after staring at a fresco of the Devil collecting the dead, then keeps being mistaken for 'Elena,' a woman already gone. The repeating corpses and the dinner with the dead read as a soul that hasn't realized it's already been carried off.

Leandro isn't a butler, he's the Devil from the fresco run as a literal puppeteer. He buys dummies, arranges bodies, stages each death like a diorama, and treats the living as props in a collection. Every human in the villa is just another mannequin he's adding to the room.

Carlo, his living double, and the dummy are one obsession split three ways. The countess's household is frozen around a single act of betrayal involving Elena, and the mannequins are the family's attempt to keep the dead present and posed forever, a necrophilic refusal to let the original sin end.

A tourist drifts from her group in old Toledo, transfixed by a fresco of the Devil hauling off the plague dead. Then the streets stop making sense. Lisa is funneled into a crumbling villa run by a blind countess, her unsettling son Max, and a bald, lollipop-sucking manservant named Leandro who keeps appearing with a life-sized dummy that wears a stranger's face. Time loops. Corpses sit at dinner. The dead are mistaken for the living and back again. Bava abandons plot for pure dream-logic, building a closed circuit of murder, mannequins, and necrophilic obsession with no exit.