by Kier-La
Janisse
While many
consider The Girl Who Knew Too Much
(1963) – retitled and re-edited for the United States as Evil Eye – a ‘lesser’ Mario Bava film, and a necessary stepping
stone to the lurid grandeur of pioneering giallo
staple Blood and Black Lace the
following year, it is this very status as a ‘transitional’ work that makes it
so interesting. The ways that The Girl
Who Knew Too Much/Evil Eye interacts with various forms of texts – from the
‘paranoid woman’s films’ of the 1940s to the pulp paperbacks that gave the giallo genre its name – illustrate the
struggle for a feminine voice that had been building since the war and would
become a hallmark of that decade. The giallo
film genre is not known for its ‘feminist’ qualities, and this is another thing
that makes Evil Eye unique: it is
more aligned with the gender politics of Black
Sunday than with the litany of giallo
films that followed in its wake, making it one of Bava’s most feminist horror
films – despite tacked-on endings in both versions that neutralise that voice.
