I'm a bit surprised at the warm regard for this film given the fact that it makes little sense at all. Sure it has some nice, interesting visuals, but the story, in a word, is incomprehensible. If I have it right, the story deals with a young man being let out of an asylum on a temporary basis to see if he is indeed now sane. He moves back to his palatial home with all his exotic pets like parrots, fish, a raven, and a monkey(who took care of them in his absence is anyone's guess?). No one else lives there, and his close childhood friends and their mother come for a weekend visit where he tries to discover a plot to keep him in the asylum by these relatives/friends(?). From there we get some intrigue, murder, and plot twists that individually sustain interest but as a whole just do not add up evenly. Whilst all this goes on, the newly repaired, local church gets a new bell - which actually does become relevant at some time in the movie. There are some fantastic scenes in this film but not enough of them for the sake of continuity(trying to stress this point). Characters are introduced in haphazard fashion given little exposition, and they turn out to be very relevant in the film's end. Who was the man at the end? What kind of relationship did he have with the young man? If I have to play twenty questions at the end of the movie, then the movie ultimately failed to convincingly get its point across. Anyway, some scenes which are done effectively are the bell scene that becomes important, the scene with the girls with their hands literally tied, and the end - though no real explanation is given. Yes, this is very typed for the kind of Euro-horror of its time, but men like Bava, Argento, and a few others could make much better transitions between scenes that might not look like they had any real relationship. the first part of this film is very dull and lacking in the imagination department, but things definitely do rev up some by the film's second half.