It’s no wonder so many novels by Vladimir Nabokov were made into movies. After all, we are talking about the man who once said: “If you don’t admire all the colours when you are outside, there is no point in becoming a writer.” The same goes for watching a movie by Mario Bava: he was a genius at composing colourful movies. Many movies from the sixties have a special colour, but even amongst other movies from that decade, Bava’s clearly stand out.

The Evil Eye (also known as The Girl who Knew too Much) is a black-and-white movie. There are no colours to admire, apart from the variations in grey. Is it still a great movie? Yes. The colours are that little bit extra, the bit that makes a good movie excellent. In The Evil Eye we follow Nora, an American girl who goes to Italy to visit her sick aunt. There she witnesses a murder, or so she thinks. There is no body to be found and, only moments before the murder, Nora had been attacked by a thief. As we follow her on her journey to the truth, it becomes clear why the European title (a literal translation from the original Italian title, La Ragazza che sepeva troppo) is The Girl who Knew too Much. This is the Bava version of a Hitchcock movie, a case study for Bava’s later gialli.

If we forgive the movie for being a bit too sketchy at times, we are left with an intriguing puzzle, with a movie that wants to show beauty in almost every scene, with a few scenes that’ll remain in your head for at least a few months. in short, with a very good movie. Letitía Román is so intriguing it looks like she is having an affair with the camera. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be the voyeur.