The House of Exorcism: Plot, Production History, and Connection to Lisa and the Devil

The House of Exorcism is a horror film built from Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil and expanded with newly filmed scenes about demonic possession. The result combines Bava’s surreal, atmospheric story with an exorcism plot inspired by the enormous success of The Exorcist.

In the film, American tourist Lisa Reiner collapses in Toledo after encountering a mysterious bald man who resembles the Devil in a medieval fresco. At a hospital, Father Michael suspects that Lisa is possessed, but the spirit inside her is not the Devil: it is Elena, a woman who died fifty years earlier after a grotesque family tragedy. Lisa’s soul, meanwhile, appears to be trapped in the supernatural world connected to Elena’s past.

Basic Information

What Is The House of Exorcism About?

Elke Sommer plays a tourist who wanders from her party and meets a stranger called Leandro, played by Telly Savalas complete with lollipop, who resembles a portrait of the Devil which Lisa has just seen. She is unable to meet up with her tour party and stays the night in a nearby mansion where it turns out Leandro is the butler.

Lisa’s stay at the mansion turns into a surreal nightmare as people begin to die around her and she falls under the spell of one of its occupants. Tourist Lisa Reiner collapses in the street while visiting Toledo, and is brought to a hospital. While the doctors are clueless about what’s wrong with Lisa, priest Father Michael sees signs of demonic possession.

The House of Exorcism begins with Lisa Reiner touring some old Spanish city where one of the more noteworthy architectural features is a Medieval fresco depicting the Devil carrying damned souls away to Hell. Shortly after seeing the fresco, she visits an antique shop at the same time that the proprietor is consulting with a spiffy-looking bald man about a creepy, life-sized puppet.

Lisa flees the shop when she realizes that the bald puppeteer looks exactly like the Devil in the old fresco, and that’s where The House of Exorcism begins diverging from its source material. Rather than following Lisa down the suddenly unfamiliar street, the camera now stays in the shop, where the two men cryptically discuss some business that surely bodes ill for her.

The Possession Plot

Evidently she looks as much like somebody named Elena as Baldy resembles the painting of Satan, and that similarity makes her suitable for the same mysterious undertaking as the sinister puppet. The shopkeeper produces a wax head presumably sculpted in Elena’s image, and when Baldy strikes it with his hand, Lisa collapses on the pavement in some kind of seizure.

The girl from the tour group whom she’d befriended can’t seem to get anyone among the gathering crowd to do anything but gawp at Lisa’s suffering, but when a priest called Father Michael comes forward, the onlookers become more responsive. Soon enough an ambulance is on the scene, and Father Michael stays with Tour Group Girl as she accompanies her strangely ailing new friend to the hospital.

If you’ve seen The Exorcist or any of its derivatives, you already know that the doctors there aren’t going to find anything physically wrong with Lisa. You also already know how her symptoms are going to progress: growly voice, violent tendencies, creatively foul mouth, inexplicable facial ulcerations, malicious psychological mischief directed against everyone who tries to help her, and eventually even a few paranormal abilities.

Trusting Tour Group Girl’s assessment that the patient was nothing like this before, the lead doctor puts in a call for a psychiatrist, but Father Michael finagles permission to look the woman over while they wait for the shrink’s arrival. You see, when the doctor explained dissociative identity disorder to him, it put the priest in mind of something rather more in his own field-demonic possession.

Who Is Elena?

But while it turns out that Lisa is indeed possessed, the evil spirit inhabiting her is no devil, but the soul of a woman named Elena, who died 50 years ago. Elena had been part of a grotesque incestuous quadrangle involving her husband, her mother-in-law, and her husband’s stepfather.

The family melodrama culminated in a killing spree at a dilapidated villa not far from the place where Lisa had her seizure. Ever since then, the four sinners-together with three equally sinful strangers who got caught up in the affair’s bloody endgame-have been reliving that night over and over again in the afterworld, literally creating their own Hell.

Well, Elena is sick of it, you hear? She’s getting out, and Lisa has unwittingly furnished her with just the vehicle she needs in order to do so. That’s where about 75% of Lisa and the Devil comes in.

If Elena’s soul is in Lisa’s body, cursing at Father Michael and attacking the hospital staff, then it follows logically enough that Lisa’s spirit must be in Hell, taking Elena’s part in the eternally reenacted drama of a perverse family destroying itself.

But I think we’re meant to believe that this cycle of the infernal time loop ends up being different, simply because it isn’t really Elena playing the part of the woman coveted equally by her impotent, insane husband and her insistent pussy-hound stepfather-in-law.

Father Michael and the Exorcism

While Lisa’s soul drifts through the edited highlights of Lisa and the Devil in the next world, Father Michael squares off against Elena in this one, struggling to drive her out of Lisa’s body. At first, the latter contest plays out according to the familiar model, with Michael chanting prayers and brandishing the symbols of his vocation while Elena attacks his psychological weak points.

Her best trick is to appear to him in the guise of his former wife, Anna, whose hideous death in a flaming car wreck drove Michael into the priesthood in the first place. But as Father Michael comes to understand his opponent better, he realizes that he’s going about this all wrong.

It isn’t Lisa that needs exorcising, but the ruins of the villa where Elena and the others lived and died. Cap that cosmic sewer, and the route whereby the restless damned may influence the material world will be cut off.

There’s one thing Michael hasn’t considered, however. As much trouble as he’s having asserting his holy authority over one depraved human spirit, does he really think he’s up to battling the Devil himself?

How The House of Exorcism Was Created

Lisa and the Devil was a heartbreaking experience for Mario Bava, no two ways about it. It was his most personal film, and one which in some respects he’d been working on subconsciously since the beginning of his career, yet the only person who really seemed to appreciate it was producer Alfredo Leone.

The movie’s inability to attract buyers except in Spain and Portugal was a major blow for Leone, too, for he’d put a lot of money into the project by contemporary Italian standards-not Dino De Laurentiis money, to be sure, but certainly far more than he’d spent on Knives of the Avenger or Baron Blood.

He simply couldn’t afford to leave that kind of capital tied up in an asset that wasn’t earning him anything back. But something remarkable happened during the year or so after Leone gave up trying to interest anyone in the movie he considered to be Bava’s masterwork: first The Exorcist made all the money in the world, and then a bunch of cheap copies of it collectively made all the money in the world all over again.

Hang on a second, Leone thought Lisa and the Devil was a film about a woman losing her soul to Satan, right? And that’s kind of what happens in demonic possession, right? So what if Bava found some way to add an exorcism scene to the climax? Then Leone could rename it something like The House of Exorcism, and maybe some cigar-chomping toad like Sam Arkoff would finally buy the fucking thing.

Naturally, Bava wasn’t exactly thrilled with the idea. If it was true that Lisa and the Devil was his masterpiece, then Leone was now asking him to vandalize it. The director knew and accepted how things worked in the movie business, though, and at least professed to think of himself as a craftsman rather than an artist.

Craftsmen don’t get all high-horsey about the purity of their vision when the product they deliver won’t perform according to spec, so Bava put aside his feelings about the assignment, and got to work rebuilding Lisa and the Devil into an Exorcist knockoff.

The Difference Between the Two Versions

I won’t try to argue that the result isn’t markedly inferior to the original version, or that The House of Exorcism’s success in finding takers where Lisa and the Devil could not doesn’t represent a deplorable victory for the lowest common denominator.

But it’s a far cry from there to the common critical assessment that The House of Exorcism is devoid of value except perhaps as a kind of long-form trailer for its harder-to-find source film. It does fill the latter bill, certainly, but the contortions necessary to create compatibility between Lisa and the Devil and the possession movie template make The House of Exorcism an Exorcist cash-in like no other.

For one thing, precisely because The House of Exorcism is so much more linear and literal, it almost functions as a kind of Cliff’s Notes to Lisa and the Devil, spelling out much of what Bava had deliberately left opaque and ambiguous the first time around.

Viewers who are easily frustrated by extremely slippery narratives might even benefit from tackling The House of Exorcism first to assure themselves that there really is an understandable story buried in the original cut somewhere.

This version is also of interest because it uses alternate edits and indeed alternate takes of a few scenes, in such a way that comparative viewing helps to map out the limits of what Bava considered to be acceptably poor taste.

Alternate Takes, Sex, and Violence

Take, for example, the sex scene between Sylvia Koscina and Gabriele Tinti. In Lisa and the Devil, it’s quite demure, shot not just at a discreet distance, but also through a screen of partially obscuring objects among the bedroom décor.

The House of Exorcism uses a much more explicit take shot during the original period of principal photography at Alfredo Leone’s insistence, which he intended to hold in reserve for distributors who wanted a hotter cut of Lisa and the Devil for markets with laxer censorship.

Having already taken a bath on Bava’s preferred cut, Leone not unreasonably decided that it couldn’t hurt his chances of selling the rebuild if he substituted the more explicit take from the get-go. Similarly, The House of Exorcism features gorier versions of some of the murders, although with them it’s merely a question of reinstating a deleted close-up here and there.

I can’t decide whether or not to be surprised that Bava, like the MPAA ratings board, apparently had bigger hang-ups about sex than he did about violence.

Why the Film Divides Viewers

Let us get one thing clear right now, The House of Exorcism is a bad film, and I mean really bad. It is one of the worst films in Mario Bava’s filmography and certainly the worst Horror film in it.

It is a confusing, ill thought out film that should not exist and a complete waste of celluloid. Despite this, the failures of this film are not really Bava’s fault.

You see, The House of Exorcism is at its core a recut of one of Bava’s best films, Lisa and the Devil. That film though, as great as it is was also ahead of its time and could not find an audience in either its native Italy or the all-important American market.

Faced with a film that was not selling, the film’s producer Alfred Leone hatched a plan. The same year Lisa and the Devil debuted, so did The Exorcist, which unlike Lisa and the Devil was a massive hit and soon spawned a legion of imitators.

In order to salvage Lisa and the Devil it was decided that the film would join those imitators and thus unrelated scenes of an exorcism were shot by Leone himself after Bava declined and the film was retitled The House of Exorcism.

The results were disastrous as audiences in both the United States as well as Europe quickly dismissed the film as an inferior knock off of The Exorcist, and the film was quickly forgotten until Lisa and the Devil would finally find a wider audience several years later.

Narrative Problems

And what is the plot you ask? Well, just take several scenes from Lisa and the Devil and combine them with scenes of Father Michael performing an exorcism on Lisa from the original cut. The results are absolutely confusing and not in a good way.

I will be the first to admit that Lisa and the Devil can be a bit confusing, and it was this that caused the film’s chilly initial reception. But Lisa and the Devil was not incoherent, while this film very much is.

Watching the film it is quite obvious the original footage and the newly shot exorcism footage does not go together and the film does a horrible job even trying to link them. Initially it appears as if the original footage is supposed to be part of some sort of hallucination the demon possessed Lisa is having.

It is an idea that is to be sure lazy and trite, but it at least kind of makes sense. Later on though it becomes clear that the original footage is supposed to be part of a flashback, which in still a bit trite, though not as much so and would at least require some attention to continuity, but is also even more incoherent as Lisa has flashbacks of scenes she is not in.

To make matters worse, the new cut also ruins the majesty of the original footage. Oh sure the footage is there, and it all looks great showing once again that Bava’s brilliance can find a way to come out, but by cutting so much of the original footage this footage, as good as it looks, also loses its context and story, instead becoming confusing.

Instead of a wonderful story that meditated on all of Bava’s favorite themes, we are instead left with a string of scenes that feel like they do not go well together at all and do not tell a story, or at least not a coherent one.

Any film would suffer from such a fate, but with Lisa and the Devil this is particularly harsh as the original cut was confusing as well. It was confusing in a way that worked, but it was still confusing.

The Newly Filmed Material

As poor as the original footage is now though, it is a masterpiece compared to the new footage. The new exorcist themed footage is drab, boring, and somehow still incoherent in and of itself even though it is telling a fairly simple story.

Watching the film it is clear no one really wanted to make it, and as much as I think trying to salvage Lisa and the Devil in this manner is a mistake, and as much as I criticize filmmakers from “phoning in” their work, I really do not blame them here.

To see any film fail is disheartening to all those who made it, and to make it a low rent rip off of a popular film is particularly disheartening. But Lisa and the Devil was not just another commercial failure, it was to be a meditation on all of Bava’s favorite themes, so to see those making the new footage not really wanting to do so is at the very least understandable.

To make matters even worse it is clearly early on that Alfred Leone is no Mario Bava as he lacks Bava’s keen eye for making a film look great. In fact the film’s inferiority to the original cut is apparent even in the opening credits as the wonderful “card playing” of the original credits is replaced with just another drab and very pedestrian opening credits.

Yet worse is how bad the acting is as Alda is horribly wooden here and even Sommer, despite being great in the original film here looks as if she would rather be somewhere else. The other characters also act very awkwardly around the priest and it is odd to note that no one refers to him as “Father” in the film despite the movie being made by Italians, most of whom had grown up in pre-World War II Italy.

The Film and The Exorcist

It is also clear that those making the new footage did not get The Exorcist. And I mean like at all.

While it is true that The Exorcist was a well-made and lovingly crafted film, part of what made it have such a big impact when it first came out is that the film was about a young girl, and in those days, even after the 1960s had drastically reshaped the culture at large, the idea of a 12 year old girl cursing a blue streak, masturbating with a crucifix, and other such things were deeply shocking the frightening.

But in The House of Exorcism Lisa is an adult, so all of her actions do not have the same impact. And to make matters even worse, thanks to the film’s low budget. Lisa for the most part sticks to cursing and occasionally doing something else, and not of it particularly interesting.

No matter what she does however it cannot touch the impact of The Exorcist. Still worse is the fact that the dialogue here is horrible, so when Lisa curses it comes across more as funny rather than scary.

What Still Works

It feels weird to be defending, if only conditionally, such an unapologetic dumbing-down of a film whose greatest strength lay in its equally unapologetic braininess, but here we are just the same.

While I certainly wouldn’t recommend that anyone with a choice in the matter watch The House of Exorcism instead of Lisa and the Devil, the rebuild does make for a worthwhile supplement to the original.

And finally, kudos are due to Elke Sommer for giving her all to an alternate take on a project she’d finished some two years previously. The new scenes set in the hospital had to be incredibly hard work, and morale on the set can’t have been very high given the nature of the undertaking.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen another possession movie deal directly with the subjective experiences of the possessed, so the central conceit of Lisa and the Devil becomes arguably even more startling with all the standard-issue divines-and-demoniacs business wrapped around it.

The same goes for the movie’s spin on the exorcism itself. Extracting a ghost from a person by driving the Devil out of a house mixes the tropes up nicely.

Nevertheless, if I had seen this movie in ignorance of its history, I would have been very impressed to see an Italian Exorcist knockoff straying so far from the model, in such an imaginative direction.

All in all, there’s enough good in The House of Exorcism that I’m not surprised Bava’s next film was another possession story designed as such from the ground up, just as he’d previously made Twitch of the Death Nerve to develop more fully an idea he cooked up out of sheer frustration while shooting 5 Dolls for an August Moon.

Critical Assessment

The House of Exorcism is a bad film, but it is also more than that as it also shits on a great film. Lisa and the Devil is one of Bava’s best films, but this is simply a mess that has no reason to live.

Being a bad film is one thing, but this feels almost like the destruction of great art. Yes, there are moments when Bava’s brilliance still manages to shine, and while I am tempted to say that this film should be shown in film classes to demonstrate how a director’s vision can still shine through studio interference, those moments are too far in-between to recommend this film.

There are even better The Exorcist rip offs to watch as those might be bad, but they can at least be fun and they do not shot on a great film. The House of Exorcism should pretty much be avoided except for historical purposes.

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