eventually opened in Great Britain, where it was advertised with art de- picting a frog leaping from a woman’s mouth.
It was greeted in kind by
Monthly Film Bulletin’s Richard Combs, who called it “a fair old witch’s brew from a pseudonymous Mario Bava, which would require the services of a powerful exorcist
to
drive out all its clatteringly crude and incoherent script ideas. Not that it matters . . . as his tongue is planted so firmly in cheek that it is in danger of coming out the other side. The humour for the most part is signalled by . . . Telly Savalas . . . humming ironically to himself and popping lol- lipops as if he had just dropped in from rehearsals on another show.”9
Mario Bava and Alfredo Leone did not put their past disputes behind them until life—or rather, death—in- tervened. Shortly after the Pepper- corn-Wormser deal was made, Alfredo Leone’s father died. Con- sidering that Leone had bankrolled the film Bava had intended as a trib- ute to his own father, it was the sort of loss that could not be overlooked in good conscience. “Mario came by the house to pay his condolences,” Leone recalls. “He brought a fruitcake, I remember, which is an Italian custom—some- thing to sweeten your period of mourning. Anyway, we talked about various things and then, after a quiet moment, he said to me, ‘You know, Alfredo, if you want to put my name back on the film, it’s okay with me.’ “I said, ‘Mario, if you want your name back on the film, ask me to do it and I’ll do it, but I can only do it for Europe now, because it’s too late for America.’” Bava agreed, and the story is veri- fied by the fact that Bava’s name ap- pears as director on the film’s Euro- pean prints and advertising materials. The House of Exorcism was sold all over the world—even in Germany, where Baron Blood had failed to se- cure distribution—and became the biggest commercial success of Leone’s career.
