Many episode movies were made in the 60s, and many adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s works. But Spirits of the Dead, from 1968, is like no other. A casual look at its poster will make it immediately clear.

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The directors of the three segments – Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini – certainly do not pass unnoticed, Malle and Fellini in particular being regarded as masters of their generation. But what strikes the most, maybe, is the cast, the features of Jane Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, and Terence Stamp still recognizable in the drawing-like image. But the light of these absolute stars of the silver screen, in this case, only seems to put in evidence the outsider who appears in the bottom left corner: a little girl holding a ball.

To those who, pushed by the curiosity to discover who this character is, watch the movie until the end, it is revealed that the mysterious creature appears in the last segment, Fellini’s Toby Dammit, an adaptation of Poe’s Never Bet the Devil Your Head. Stamp, we see, plays the titular character, the troubled Shakespearean actor Toby Dammit, while the enigmatic little girl is nothing less than the Devil, to whom Toby finally loses his head.

The painter credited with the picture in the church of Santa Maria del Parto was a certain Leonardo da Pistoia, a minor artist. There is little doubt that he would not have chosen such an unusual model for the Devil had he not been so instructed by his employer, Diomede Carafa, bishop of Ariano. The clergyman, apparently, had long been tempted by a beautiful woman, whose advances he had always rejected. To immortalize his personal win over sin, he asked Leonardo da Pistoia to give the Devil in the painting the features of his temptress, Vittoria d’Avalos.

Nothing suggests that Fellini might have thought of Leonardo da Pistoia’s Devil when he turned the old man in Poe’s short story into a little girl with a ball. It is far more likely that he might have been influenced by Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill, released two years earlier, since that movie features a murderous little girl, too. Whatever their reasons might have been, Leonardo da Pistoia and Federico Fellini ended up giving their demons features much more often associated with angels, creating a contrast whose fascination is still alive today. But, even more than the characters, it is the people behind them that are mesmerizing.

Apparently, the woman represented in the church in Mergellina is not the famous poetess Vittoria Colonna d’Avalos, of whom much is known, but a much more obscure person by a similar name. Fair enough, considering that this woman, if she really existed, must have been dead for centuries now. A different matter is Fellini’s little girl. Although she is much closer to our time, and we know for certain that she has existed, Toby Dammit’s nemesis is surrounded by the blackest darkness. We are told she is, or was called, Marina Yaru. She would have actually been 22 at the time of the film, so not really a child, and would have been of mixed Russian and Italian descent. Anyway, it is not clear where this information comes from, and whether it should be trusted or not. Almost nothing, except her mesmerizing appearance in the movie, seems to be known of her, and this is, ultimately, what makes her so fascinating: Marina Yaru’s mark on the real world is almost as enigmatic and puzzling as the little girl in Fellini’s film, blurring the boundary between the cinematic fiction and the reality lying just beneath its surface.