thinking that the movie that bore this title has already been released. Consequently, Mario Bava’s most famous film has entered the 21st century as twins, the older success- fully usurping the younger’s place in our modern world. Both versions are beautiful . . . but different. One is the director’s original creation— complete and uncut, uncut in the dual sense of being uncensored and also a flawed gem, like an uncut dia- mond. The other version is the director’s first tour de force—a cut version, but cut like a diamond, some- how more perfect and scintillating in its streamlined reduction. If a Baxter- scored version of the uncut film ex- isted, there would be no problem; as things stand, it is difficult to choose between them.
Commentary
La maschera del demonio is consid- ered by many to be the most auspi- cious directorial debut in the history of horror films. Its arrival on theater screens was greeted as a welcome return to the black-and-white, Old World atmosphere of Universal’s “golden age” horrors, while the younger, Hammer-bred generation of horror aficionados responded with equal enthusiasm to its unflinching scenes of graphic horror. Beyond these studio signatures, Bava’s grounding in cinematography im- bued the film with a greater empha- sis on visual storytelling—visual con- tinuity, in fact—than had been perpetrated by any horror film since the 1920s. It also had a dark fairy tale aspect, which marked its inher- itance from such European anteced- ents as F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1923) and—the most pronounced of all its influ- ences—Cocteau’s La Belle et le Bête, with which it also shared a pro- nounced romanticism that made it un- usually palatable to female audience members.
Despite the catholicism of its in-
fluences, La maschera del demonio also represented something new. It was not second-hand German Ex- pressionist like the Universal horror
