Cagliostro is a lurid tale of magic and secret societies during the reign of Luis XVI, centred on the gure of the Italian occultist Giuseppe Balsamo, known under his alias of Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. The book owes its style of presentation to the example of German expressionist cinema, of the kind exemplified by The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

In the early s, Vicente Huidobro--always fascinated by the new medium of film--wrote a script on the subject of Cagliostro. The film seems to have been made in 1923 by the Romanian director Mime Mizu, but was scrapped due to dissatisfaction with the editing. No trace of the film survives, although three pages from a script exist in the author's papers. A revised version of the script was submitted to The League for Better Motion Pictures in New York in and won a $10,000 award as the best candidate for a new movie. Alas, this was just when the "talkies" arrived and this style of film was immediately rendered outmoded. The author converted the script into a novella, retaining many cinematic elements, and it was published in English translation in 1931, to positive reviews. It appeared in the original Spanish only in 1934, in the author's native Santiago, where it made no impact at all. This edition reproduces the text of the translation.