‘Back in the day’ the average horror film was more tolerated than welcomed. Riccardo Freda’s Italian L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock was initially released to the same critical silence then granted most horror pictures. That changed after it was championed by the surrealists, who considered its transgressor doctor a surrealist hero in pursuit of a delirious objective: an ultimate rapture. It was frequently mentioned in the company of other surrealist-approved films like Duck Soup, King Kong and Peter Ibbetson. Then the usually dry The Monthly Film Bulletin expanded its remarks to note in Hichcock a new kind of cinematic insider spoofery, years before Brian De Palma: director ‘Robert Hampton’ and writer ‘Julyan Perry’ affectionately restage motifs and situations from Alfred Hitchcock movies. The movie is serious, but its title is a sly pun. Even the MFB realized that all of the film’s credits had been Anglicized, to give the impression of an English production. The names weren’t changed to protect the innocent, but to fool Italian audiences, who like everyone else in the early ’60s preferred Hammer films to home-grown horrors.
Released in America two years later with a down-market ‘do you dare’ ad campaign, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock surprised viewers with an unthinkable theme: necrophilia. The ad copy danced poetically around the taboo subject matter: “The candle of his lust burnt brightest in the shadow of the grave!” … “His secret was a coffin named desire!” The dialogue makes no overt mention of any such forbidden activity, but the central image on view is the sight of the indeed horrible doctor suffering his ‘unholy desires,’ grimacing in stress as he tries to resist his compulsion. Whenever Doc Hichcock is on screen alone the delirium factor shoots through the roof. Roman Vlad’s funereal, swooning music score — with the BEST morbid theme ever for a horror movie — seems to drive him forward. And when he reaches the object of his passion the images launch into chromatic expressionism: a white-tiled surgery holding room suddenly lights up in a fiery red representing unadulterated LUST. The red light that suffuses the scenes is pure cinema — it has no organic source.
For years The Horrible Dr. Hichcock saw scant mention in print; it was far too adult to be featured in the adolescent-pitched magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. If it should show up on TV, schedulers knew not what they were getting — I can imagine a broadcast technician watching and thinking, ‘Is this movie about what I think it’s about?’ In 1962 anything resembling necrophilia was sick humor outside polite discussion — ‘dead baby’ jokes maybe, but not that. The first overt joke I can remember to reference the subject was a throwaway line in a Woody Allen movie: “I’d call you a sadistic bestial necrophile, but that’s beating a dead horse.”
Those who saw The Horrible Dr. Hichcock on a screen in Technicolor must have had a special experience: back in film school it was an unattainable show, top on the list of Pictures One Could Not Find.
In the 1890s, brilliant surgeon Dr. Bernard Hichcock (respected English actor Robert Flemyng) is experimenting with a powerful anesthetic that allows him to perform previously impractical surgeries. But Bernard’s assistants are unaware that he molests corpses in the morgue. Even more incredible, Hichcock has worked out a bizarre sex game with his wife Margaretha (Maria Teresa Vianello as Teresa Fitzgerald). With the aid of his sinister housekeeper Martha (Harriet White Medin as Harriet White), Bernard uses his anesthetic to put Margaretha in a deep sleep approximating death, so as to facilitate his strange sexual preference. But something goes horribly wrong…
Some time later, Dr. Hichcock returns from Italy with a new bride, Cynthia (Barbara Steele). He takes up his practice again but refuses to use his serum, to the consternation of his assistants. Cynthia soon realizes that nothing is as it should be. Martha is cold and resentful, and strange happenings convince Cynthia that the house is haunted by Wife #1. What she can’t possibly know is that Bernard is again falling under the spell of that old black magic. He still has vials of his anesthetic serum close at hand.
I first saw The Horrible Dr. Hichcock in a 16mm print I purchased for $40 from college friend Robert S. Birchard. It was missing several minutes and lacked an end title, but the incredible music was intact, and ‘Donald Green’s’ cinematography looked good, even in slimy B&W. After poring over old issues of Mini-Minuit Fantastique borrowed from James Ursini, I learned only that actress Steele hadn’t liked filming in cold crypts, or trying to look glamorous while working twenty-hour work days. Horrible did show on Los Angeles TV once, but in faded color and heavily edited to accommodate extra commercials.
Then came the 1990s and a Sinister Cinema tape of the original version. It allowed me to speculate on the film’s mad themes for an online essay that was reprinted in the first Horror Film Reader: Women on the Verge of a Gothic Breakdown: Sex, Drugs and Corpses in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. And then came the revelations in Tim Lucas’s magazine Video Watchdog. Lucas determined that the alternate title Raptus, The Secret of Dr. Hichcock was not a legend, but was actually on export prints before the film was re-titled for England (The Terror of Dr. Hichcock) and America (The Horrible Dr. Hichcock).
Through authoritative interviews with the prolific Italo writer Ernesto Gastaldi (“Julyan Perry’), Tim Lucas learned that the shooting script had pages of standard expositional dialogue that presumably filled in blank spots in the movie’s characterizations and motivations. Director Freda reportedly threw all that material away and instead concentrated on the macabre visual flow. Various story clues may be disconnected, but the film has an extraordinary concentration on its dark themes.
We finally arrive at a point where Bernard once again immerses himself in madness. He surrenders to his sex mania and restages one of his funeral lovemaking sessions, but this time with an unwilling partner. The climax of this chemically-induced seduction is a horrific visual that can only be explained as Cynthia’s subjective experience, under the influence of the paralyzing serum: Bernard’s face bathed in the expressionist scarlet haze, bloating and changing shape as if transformed from within by his perverted lust.
Among the early Euro-horror hits Hichcock is THE prime corridor-wandering movie. The motif requires one vulnerable heroine in a nightgown, exploring an unknown creepy house or garden. Candelabra in hand, Cynthia takes at least four long walks through the overgrown garden and underground tunnels, searching for the ‘phantom bride’ with the skull-like face and the high-top laced boots. Ms. Steele probably saw little merit in the picture because her character spends all of her time as a passive prop.
Freda is a weird director. His camera travels nicely but he also slams us with tacky smash zooms. There was apparently enough time to imaginatively light the set (not easy for color on location in 1962) but not enough time to properly rehearse the actors. Flemying is always on task, agonizing like a drug addict wanting his fix. But on more than one occasion the director seems to abandon Barbara Steele. One scene really looks like a stage wait, with Barbara hearing a cue and falling into character as we watch. For a full beat she stands smiling at the camera patiently waiting.
Some of the Hi t chcock parallels cited by The Monthly Film Bulletin are easy to spot: Rebecca’s sinister housekeeper; a wretched dead-alive woman kept in a cellar (Psycho), a sinister glass of milk (Suspicion), the skull by the pillow (Under Capricorn). But there’s also a pointed parallel in depth with Vertigo. Both it and Horrible see a man trying to make one woman take the place of her dead predecessor. Soul brothers Scotty Ferguson and Bernard Hichcock share an unspeakable desire, even though Scotty’s necrophilia is not directly physical. Also from Vertigo come the stylized, scarcely motivated shafts of colored light that place Scotty’s obsession in a feverish haze, a sensory overkill. Bernard’s erotic excitement is represented by blasts of red that fill rooms with a ‘lust from beyond the grave.’
Thematically, at least, The Horrible Dr. Hichcock goes beyond the gothic framework to work out an original, resolutely adult story, which crosses the boundaries of safe ‘horror’ subject matter. It of course remains a generic construction — a hero arrives to rescue the damsel in distress, and the finale is a standard Rebecca- like conflagration. Modern horror films now make Freda and Gastaldi’s elegant little bit of nastiness seem tame. But not really. Back in the relatively complacent world of 1962, shocking an audience with scary ideas was a meaningful thing to do.
