'Lisa and The Devil' (1973) – Mario Bava.

No less indelible a nightmare than maestro, Mario Bava's fiendishly twisted, landmark shocker 'Black Sabbath', his macabre masterpieces retaining all their dark mystery, and inspiring generations of film-makers. Bava's distinctly devilish, supernaturally sinister, psychologically perverse, doom-veiled descent into eerie, reality-warping terror offers the discerning horror fan a crypt creepy cornucopia of profoundly disturbing demonic delirium! Poor Lisa (Elke Sommer)suffers terrible hallucinations, or, perhaps, are they the preternatural premonitions of some inexorable evil to come! These increasingly nightmarish revelations drawing her ever deeper into a morbidly mind-hazing occult vortex of diabolical dementia, while utterly fantastic, they could be far more real than her beleaguered mind can cope with! 

One of 'Lisa and the Devil's' finest attributes are Bava's infamously skewed sense of humour, and the singular ease with which he bedazzles the audience with audacious in-camera trickery. The weird unreality of Lehar's once grand, now dilapidated estate, seeming out of time, almost as though poor Lisa were disturbingly trapped within some monstrously bedevilled bell-jar. A manifestly grim, unreal place, mustily steeped in Machiavellian malignity, perhaps, the surrealistic sleight of hand of some evilly capricious, maddeningly unseen conjurer! The creepily captivating cypher for all of Bava's grisly-Gothic machinations is the sardonic, sexily satanic Leandro (Telly Savalas). Ostensibly the loyal, lollipop savouring manservant, Leandro's mordant predilection for darkly humorous asides, and outright villainy makes him the darkly charismatic, macabrely mannequin manipulating, murder manifesting misfit in, Mario Bava's iconic 'Lisa and The Devil'. This exquisitely fashioned, fascinatingly off-kilter, uniquely beauteous vision of gnostic fantasy is one of his very best.