Almost a full year prior to Curse of Frankenstein, Riccardo Freda, an experienced filmmaker who had previously specialized in low-budget historical epics, directed I Vampiri (1957), which is often credited as the first proper Italian horror film. Shot by Mario Bava, who would go on to his own extremely influential career as a horror director starting with Black Sunday (1960), I Vampiri updated the Countess of Bathory legend to modern-day Paris while maintaining the familiar imagery and tone of classical gothic literature. The problem was that I Vampiri had a tepid critical and commercial response, while the Hammer films were international smashes. Freda and others came to the conclusion that it was the Italian-ness of the film that was the stumbling block—the assumption that only the British and Americans made good horror films—which led to a decades-long tendency for Italian filmmakers and actors to take on anglicized pseudonyms to create the illusion that their films were American or British studio products.

Freda adopted the name Robert Hampton, under which he directed several horror films, starting with Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (Caltiki il mostro immortale) (1959), about a Blob-like creature discovered by archaeologists in a Mayan ruin. However, the film for which he became the most famous was The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock, also known as The Terror of Dr. Hichcock), a nasty gothic chiller about a necrophiliac doctor in late-19th-century London. The titular Dr. Hichcock, whose name is an amusing allusion to the great Alfred Hitchcock, a filmmaker whose influence is abundantly clear throughout the film, is played by British actor Robert Flemyng, a veteran of both stage and screen who is quite convincing as an apparently noble medical doctor whose sexual cravings can only be quenched by ravaging motionless female bodies. The film opens, in fact, with him knocking out a grave digger and then, with trembling hands, caressing the white-gowned body of a recently deceased girl. It’s an uneasy opening that sets the tone for the rest of the film, which hinges heavily on the lurking presence of perversity and horror beneath the thin veneer of polite society. The blurring of those two spheres is captured nicely in the anesthetic that Dr. Hichcock has invented: It slows bodily processes to near-death, which allows him to perform otherwise impossible medical procedures, much to the amazement of his colleagues, but then doubles as a twisted means of making his willing wife, Margherita (Maria Teresa Vianello), like a corpse during sex, which takes place in a special room in his manor that is draped in black and made to look like a funeral parlor.

Unfortunately, Dr. Hichcock overdoses Margherita one night, resulting in her death, which sends him into hysterics and exile, leaving the manor in the hands of his steely-eyed maid, Martha (Harriet Medin). Years later he returns with a new bride, the wide-eyed Cynthia (Barbara Steele), who has no idea of her new husband’s exotic sexual practices. What she does immediately pick up on is his continued obsession with Margherita, who is present all over the still unchanged manor in various massive oil paintings. Cynthia starts seeing and hearing strange things, especially a ghostly woman in white who she comes to believe is Margherita’s ghost haunting her. Dr. Hichcock assures her there is nothing to fear, but coming from him, that is hardly reassuring (he also pulls the “female hysteria” card, alluding to a breakdown she had years earlier following the death of her father). Thus, the film builds suspense via several interrelated burning questions, notably when Dr. Hichcock will reveal to Cynthia his sexual predilections and whether Cynthia is losing her mind (again) or whether Margherita’s spirit truly is haunting her. Steele, who was well on her way to becoming a cult icon after her memorable star turn in Bava’s Black Sunday, doesn’t have much to do other than look alternately quaint, concerned, and fearful, but she makes the most of an otherwise perfunctory role.

Like many Italian horror films, the story in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is a mess of inconsistency, unanswered questions, and a general disregard for plot logic (the screenplay was penned by the prolific Ernesto Gastaldi, writing under the misspelled pseudonym Julyan Perry). Freda, whose background was in art and design, smooths over most of the gaping plot holes and “Huh?” moments with copious doses of style and atmosphere, which gives the film a consistently immersive, dreamlike aura. Freda, again collaborating with cinematographer Raffaele Masciocchi (they had previously worked together on the sword-and-sandal epic The Giants of Thessaly [I giganti della Tessaglia, 1960]), demonstrates that he is nothing if not a gifted stylist, and he drenches the frame with swirling mist, strong backlighting, overstuffed sets, and intensely saturated colors that often have no logic in the world of the story, but look incredible. One of the film’s most impressive sequences is Margherita’s funeral, which is simultaneously drenched in both a downpour of rain and radiant beams of sunshine, which combines to create an ominously ethereal effect.

Freda clearly understood the trappings of the gothic genre, and he includes virtually every element one could imagine: the dark, brooding manor that is home to buried secrets and repressed desires; the innocent female protagonist tormented by the sins of others; the violent, predatory male villain, whose sexual perversion is his defining characteristic; and the constant conflict between the past and present, with the former eventually engulfing everyone as it refuses to be forgotten. He also puts together a number of squirm-inducing sequences, including a character who wakes up trapped in a coffin and is later strung upside down to be bled to death and a sequence in which Dr. Hichcock appears to Cynthia with his face bulbous and distorted like a gargoyle. The film is never overtly gory, but it has an overall atmosphere or depravity that is hard to shake off. Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe would be proud.

Copyright ©2016 James Kendrick

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