RUTH determines to bring an end to the hauntings by confronting Baroness Graps, a meeting that ends in their deaths.
this specific film, these decorations were not, however, created for Operazione paura, as they can also be seen lining another corridor in Piero Regnoli’s ear- lier L’ultimo preda del vampiro/The Playgirls and the Vampire (1960). There are noticeable parallels be- tween the Graps and the Vajdas of La maschera del demonio, both of whom are once-royal families fallen from grace. Just as the spiritual sickness of the Vajdas is represented by their desiccated chapel, where low winds moan through the broken pipes of an organ, the psychic preoccupations of Baroness Graps are reflected as much by her neglect of the physical world, expressed by the general mustiness of her villa and her dishevelled per- sonal appearance. As with Miss Havisham’s derelict mansion in Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, her world has been deliberately frozen at a moment of an overwhelming loss and, as the Cocteauvian torch-bearing arms in her corridors eerily suggest, the re- alities have been gradually replaced by tangible fantasies. Like Monika, Dr. Eswai has his own
great moment of self-discovery in Villa Graps when Monika’s offscreen cry for help sends him off in pursuit of a flee- ing phantom. He follows the marauder through a room, which connects to the same room,
forming a Mobius
strip; each time he traverses the room, he gains on his quarry until he suc- ceeds in catching up with and appre- hending the man, who turns to glower at Eswai with his own face. This doppelgänger sequence is one of the most shattering and disorienting mo- ments in horror cinema, all the moreso because Bava never condescends to explain it, thereby preserving its mys- tery and his film’s respect for mys- tery. As Martin Scorsese has pointed out, this scene has an antecedent of sorts in a divinely irrational moment from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), wherein a woman is shown dancing out the door of an elaborate room at screen left, only to burst im- mediately through a matching door at screen right, as she completes her
