Variety reports that Loic Magneron’s Paris-based Wide, a production-distribution boutique, has acquired international sales rights to Il Signor Diavolo, the latest -and 40th – feature from Italian horror icon Papi Avati.

Avati is best known for 1976’s The House with Laughing Windows and 1983’s Zeder which crowned him as a master of Italian giallo horror-thriller cinema at the time.

Starring Gabriel Lo Giudice and Alessandro Haber, and framed as a tribute to horror classics from the ‘70s and ‘80s, Il Signor Diavolo adapts Avati’s own novel that’s set in 1950s Italy and turns on a 14-year-old boy, Carlo, who kills Emilio, a special needs ward of the local priest. The film asks “why?”

“A fourteen-year-old boy, Carlo, killed Emilio, a disabled guy hosted by the local priest. The Italian Ministry of Interior wants to clarify what happened. The relation between the political institutions and the Church is tense. The ruling Christian party needs to protect the Church to keep its power. Carlo, the young murderer, talks about the Devil and accuses a nun of instigating him to kill his victim, Emilio. Carlo believes that Emilio caused the death of Paolino, Carlo’s best friend, two years earlier. Carlo wants to bring Paolino back from the land of the dead. By trying to do so, Carlo kills Emilio thinking he is an incarnation of the devil.”