A doctor (Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) goes to a small town in the Carpathian mountains some time around 1910 in order to perform an autopsy. The villagers are generally not pleased with this, but he presses on. At the same time, there is rumor of a ghost that appears just prior to death... and somehow these two events are connected.
I had not much experience with the work of Mario Bava, having been more familiar with the splatter subgenre of his son Lamberto. But I had always heard great things of Mario, and knew this film was considered by many to be a strong, memorable piece... most notably for a scene where the doctor chases himself or a doppelganger through a series of identical rooms. This scene is pretty great and pulled off very well for the time, no special effects needed. The Gothic atmosphere is also well captured, on par with Hammer films or the Poe works of Roger Corman.
I find this film to be something of a tightrope between Fritz Lang's "M" and Peter Medak's "Changeling". Like "M", there is a leitmotif connected to the evil force -- in "M", the whistled tune. Here, a bouncing ball. Likewise, the ball here is somewhat replicated in "Changeling", though no longer as a forewarning to the killer. Also, the colorful imagery here really anticipates the later Italian directors, particularly Argento.
Although Luca Palmerini calls the film overrated, he does say the "to the devil a daughter" theme started here and was taken up by Fellini in Toby Dammitt in "Spirits of the Dead" and later in Friedkin's "The Exorcist". I think this is a bit of stretch to connect this film to "Exorcist". Again, the white, bouncing ball symbolizing a dead child, as would later be done to great effect in "The Changeling", is the real key here to future film.
To really understand and appreciate Bava, I feel one would have to watch "Black Sabbath" or "Planet of the Vampires", but this film shall be considered my introduction to the man, and I loved him from the first camera shot. I would strongly urge others to meet him in a similar way. Different releases exist, some probably better than others. I watched two different DVDs, the better one being produced by Diamond Entertainment, but I assume a still better print exists.
