Heavily influenced by both film noir and the German krimis (kriminalfilm) of the late 50’s and early 60’s, the Italian genre of giallo (Italian for “yellow,” from the cheap yellow paperback novels upon which so many of the films were based) was enormously popular as a horror-thriller-mystery mashup for nearly two decades after the noir cycle had faded away, and Mario Bava’s 1963 La ragazza che sapeva troppo (US: The Evil Eye) is widely considered to be the very first specimen. One of the only giallo filmed in black and white and much tamer than later offerings in terms of sex and violence (the genre would set the stage for the slasher films to come), Bava’s film established the genre’s formal structure (a female visitor and/or private detective investigates a mysterious, black-gloved killer whose identity is revealed at the end) and used stunning Roman architecture to create an otherworldly, Gothic setting that becomes particularly menacing at night. Nora Davis (Letícia Román), a lover of mystery novels (Agatha Christie and Mickey Spillane are name dropped), has just arrived in Rome to visit her elderly aunt, who welcomes her by dying in her bed on the first night; Nora runs to the nearby hospital, but on the way she witnesses a woman being stabbed to death in the moonlit street, faints, and wakes up in the hospital. Later, at her aunt’s funeral, she meets a close friend of the deceased, Laura Torrani (Valentina Cortese), who kindly invites Nora to stay with her for the remainder of her vacation, but after discovering that Laura’s sister had been murdered ten years earlier by the mysterious “Alphabet Killer,” Nora receives a phone call telling her that she’ll be next to die. American actor John Saxon plays Marcello Bassi, the handsome and protective doctor who stays by Nora’s side. Bava creates plenty of frightening scenes, especially Nora’s scheduled “meetings” with the potential killer, but he punctuates them with moments of beauty, such as the two bullet holes that finally release light into the room in the penultimate sequence.