The Evil Eye

I would say...

Films like Peeping Tom, Psycho and Mario Barber's films, The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, you know, they walked.

So films like Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween could run.

I mean, even The Texas Chainsaw Massacre also took some inspiration from that.

He was totally being mentioned starting talking about Victor Miller and Friday the 13th because it's like there's no way in hell the slasher genre would exist without Mario Bava.

Because he started doing things like The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace and all these things that would evolve into Giallo's.

If those aren't already Jalos, and then that becomes slashers, right? Like that's the kind of lineage there.

Of course, you got to factor in Psycho too, sure.

So in 1968, the giallo barely existed as a coherent genre, as we've just said.

Bava had already made The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace earlier in the decade, and between them, those two films established much of what we now recognize as giallo iconography, so the masked killer, the fashion house, the black gloves.

But none of that had yet taken hold.

So for the remainder of the '60s, Italian thrillers appeared sporadically rather than the dozens that would follow once Argento's Bird with the Crystal Plumage properly initiated the boom, still two years away or so when Deborah goes into production.

I will probably be making an appearance and we'll see if we're all there and we'll have a great time, but you guys know where to find us Instagram at the scary movie project.

If you would like to talk to me about more Italian horror, I'm happy to, uh, Email me, thescarymovieproject at gmail.com. Thescarymovieproject.com is the website.

Come there to look at all the cool stuff we do.

Engage with us.

But until next time, remember, Fulci lives!

The Scary Movie Project podcast.

Learn more at thescarymovieproject.com. That's The Scary

Movie Project.

This time, it's a press conference at the airport, organised by his agent Bulma, who is played by the American actor John Saxon.

Saxon will be most familiar to horror fans for his role as Nancy's father in the original A Nightmare on Elm Street, as well as for his performances in the Mario Bava movie, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, and the 1974 proto-slasher Black Christmas.

However, given that he appeared in over 200 movies and TV shows before his death in 2020, to describe him simply as this does seem rather reductive.

Over his 60-year career, he starred opposite Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, worked with John Huston in the 1960 western The Unforgiven, and earned a Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe nomination for his performance opposite Marlon Brando in the 1966 film The Appaloosa.

could have been shorter I think honestly the movie is only 60 minutes long We'll get into it later.

But almost the first hour, I had been comparing it to the setup for Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much.

Bring it back to that.

Because I guess at that time, and again with The Monster of Venice, another early 60s film, it's about the love setup, the romance, and this very convoluted, strange courtship went on for a while.