When Katia says, “Here is the very image of my life,” in reference to the garden ruins of her castle, her words foreshadow a line from Bava’s 1973 film Lisa and the Devil, in which the reclusive necrophile Maximillian (Alessio Orano) remarks that his life “is the very configuration of this villa”—a Borgesian conceit that may suggest Bava’s own input as a screenwriter. As the couple embrace, the scene shifts back indoors, where we see a breeze blow in from out- side, which causes a hanging velvet drape to billow against one of the or- namental candle holders and catch fire. The servant Ivan puts the fire out, and in so doing, he pulls down the drape to reveal the portrait of Javutich—now torn to reveal the gears which operate the secret pas- sage behind the hearth. Taken purely as an accident, the moment seems awkwardly contrived; however, since the breeze appears to rush in from the spot where Andrej and Katia have embraced, the breeze can be inter- preted as a physical manifestation of the goodness of their affection for one another—a positive mystical force, bred by love, that works to ex- pose the hiding place of the evil within the house.
This interpretation is impossible
to reach in the AIP version, which cuts directly from the delivery of the funereal accoutrements to the orna- mental candle randomly setting the drapery on fire. At this point, the scene between Andrej, Constantine, and the priest is inserted, with Andrej’s gazing from the window in- terrupted by the discovery of the fire, which cuts to Andrej’s return from outside—the entire exterior dialogue scene is omitted, being too romantic for AIP’s target audience. Also trimmed from the AIP ver- sion was some material from the cli- max. As Asa is captured by the vil- lagers and readied for another bonfire, Andrej views the spectacle from a ground-level window in the subterranean crypt and succumbs to despair. Believing Katia to be dead, our emotional hero pleads with the
RARE color shots of the film’s Inquisition prologue, a sequence copied by countless horror films in years to come.
