though he were still a child; Carlos seems unable to accept the fact of his own death and pleads with Lisa to run away with him, as if this lost fulfillment could put breath back into his lungs; the Lehars comport themselves like a contented bourgeois couple, while their private behavior indicates a de- sire to be rid of each other; and much
MARIO BAVA offers Elke Sommer a half- hearted rescue from the Devil’s clutches, as Alfredo Leone looks on in delight.
as Princess Katia is unnerved by the portrait of her evil, twin ancestor in La maschera del demonio, the villa awakens the possibility, otherwise dormant in Lisa, that she may, or may not, be the reincarnation of Elena. Every character is comparable to a dead and damned soul, puppets condemned to re-enact their past sins throughout eternity, until they learn from these mistakes, and thus gain the wisdom necessary to move forward.
In the penultimate scene, Lisa— who truly is the reincarnation of Elena, if we are to trust the memory awak- ened by the music box—is seemingly spared the Hell of dying once again in Maximillian’s bed . . . but is she? Her subsequent awakening in the ruins of the villa, nude in a garden, suggests a rebirth and the possibility that the sincerity of her love for Maximillian, this time around, has finally loosened the Devil’s grip on her soul. According to Alfredo Leone, the film—as Bava
conceived it—was originally supposed to end with this scene. However, the final scene—Leone’s own contribution to the script—takes Lisa aboard an- other of Leone’s 747 jets. Just as we think we’ve finally found our bearings, the setting changes, but the metaphor remains constant—the dead are be- ing carried away. But if the dead are being carried up into the heavens, as this metaphor suggests, who is the pilot? What saves the final fade-out from seeming like a cheap, ironic effect
