The Mephisto Waltz

• Legendary TV producer Quinn Martin (The Fugitive, The FBI) bought the film rights to Fred Mustard Stewart's novel for over $250,000 in 1969, chasing the Rosemary's Baby wave — The Mephisto Waltz ended up his only theatrical feature; everything else he made was for TV.
• Ben Maddow adapted the screenplay directly from Stewart's same-titled 1969 novel.
• The unsettling score is by Jerry Goldsmith, who brought in classical pianist Jakob Gimpel to perform the piano solos and wove Liszt's actual 'Mephisto Waltz' compositions into his own cues.
• The film's signature image — a Labrador retriever wearing a human face mask at a masquerade party — anchored the marketing campaign even though it's only a few seconds of actual screen time.
• Makeup was supervised by Dan Striepeke with Joe Di Bella, the same Fox effects team doing prosthetics work on the Planet of the Apes pictures around the same era.

Paula isn't a victim — she's the real target. The film's final twist, where she embraces a soul-swap of her own rather than escaping the occult scheme, suggests the entire setup was orchestrated so she'd end up exactly where she does. Her 'suspicion' of the plot may have been a performance for the audience she knew was watching.

The film is secretly about artistic vampirism, not supernatural possession. Ely's body-hopping is a literalized metaphor for how legendary artists consume younger collaborators, draining their vitality to extend their own relevance. Alda's journalist is the perfect victim precisely because his entire job is to immortalize someone else.

The dog in the human mask isn't just shock imagery — it's the film's clearest visual confession of what's happening to Myles: a living thing wearing someone else's face. Ely and Roxanne parade it through the masquerade almost as a taunt, hiding the real plan in plain sight in front of guests who take it for kink instead of a warning.

Music journalist Alan Alda lands the assignment of a lifetime: profiling dying piano god Duncan Ely. What Ely actually wants is Alda's body. The old maestro has been cheating death through occult soul-transfers, and Alda's wife picks up on the scheme too late — or maybe just in time. What starts as a polite biographical puff piece metastasizes into a full-body hijacking, with Jacqueline Bisset caught between two men who are increasingly the same man. Satanism, a dog wearing a human face, and a genuinely unnerving final twist make this one of the most under-discussed entries in the post-Rosemary's Baby devil wave.