Directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle and Federico Fellini, this has a different title in Italy, Tre passi nel delirio (Three Steps to Delirium). It’s an anthology that has each director show his own version of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

Vadim starts the film with “Metzengerstein” which is unique in that it’s the only on-screen pairing of Jane and Peter Fonda, who play cousins who have never met due to a family feud. She played Countess Frédérique de Metzengerstein, who has inherited the family castle and leads a life of debauchery. He is Baron Wilhelm, the man who just saved her from a trap in the woods. She falls for him but he wants nothing to do with her life of sin, so she sets his stables on fire, killing him and most of his prized horses, save for a black one that she becomes obsessed with taming. Eventually, the horse carries her into an inferno made by a bolt of lightning.

“William Wilson,” directed by Malle, has Alain Delon as the titular protagonist, a man who has dealt with a twin version of himself his entire life. After he plays cards all night with Guiseppina Ditterheim (Brigitte Bardot), the evil twin convinces people that he cheats. He finally challenges his other self to a duel with a deadly outcome for them both.

In “Toby Dammit,” directed by Fellini, Terrence Stamp plays the actor named Toby Dammit. His career is in ruin and, ironically, he comes to Italy to make a movie — Trente Dollari, an Italian Western — where he will be paid with a Ferrari. He keeps seeing a young girl with a white ball played by Marina Yaru who he becomes convinced is the devil. After he finishes the movie, he gets drunk and speeds his new car around the city until it becomes filled with replacement people and he races into a void, his head chopped off by a wire across the road, and now the girl holds his head. The Ferrari in this story is a reference to the car Clint Eastwood was given for appearing in The Witches.

if this seems to take a lot from Mario Bava’s Kill, Baby, Kill!, Fellini meant it as a tribute. In an interview, Bava said, “That ghost child with the bouncing ball… it’s the same ideas as in my film, exactly the same! I later mentioned this to Giulietta Masina (Fellini’s wife) and she just shrugged her shoulders, smiling and said, “Well, you know how Federico is…””

The difference is that Fellini would be celebrated as a great artist his entire life. And as for Bava, sadly not as much.

There’s a modern reference or coincidence in this story: When Toby Dammit arrives at the Rome airport, a Catholic priest introduces him to the Fratelli Manetti, two brothers who work in film. That’s the artistic name — the Manetti Brothers — of Marco Manetti and Antonio Manetti, who made the recent Diabolik movies.

This movie almost had Luchino Visconti, Claude Chabrol, Joseph Losey and Orson Welles as directors, with Welles and Oja Kodar writing a story that combined “Masque of the Red Death” and “The Cask of Amontillado.”

While Vadim was filming “Metzengerstein,” his friend Terry Southern — who had come to Europe to help him make Barbarella — started talking to Peter Fonda and ended up writing Easy Rider with him on set.