Barbara Steele is back and Dr. Hichcock’s got her, but it’s not that Dr. Hichcock. The producers of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock return with the same director and much the same crew, with their fake anglicized names. Ms. Steele’s unfaithful and duplicitous spouse gets a full acting workout, even with a story devoid of Taboo content, and less exciting direction from Riccardo Freda. Perhaps the real excitement is in Severin Films’ restoration of this previously ‘lost’ movie. The 62-year-old picture was re-launched at two European film festivals, giving the all-time Queen of Horror some well-earned extra time in the limelight.

The Ghost
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
Severin Films
1963 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 95 min. / Lo Spettro / Street Date February 24, 2026 / Available from Severin Films / £59.95
Starring: Barbara Steele, Peter Baldwin, Leonard G. Elliot (Elio Jotta), Harriet White (Harriet White Medin), Charles Kechler (Carlo Kechler), Raoul. H. Newman (Umberto Raho), Reginald Price Anderson (Alberto Plebani).
Cinematography: Donald Green (Raffaele Masciocchi)
Art Director: Sammy Fields (Mario Chiari)
Wardrobe: Mary McCharty
Film Editor: Donna Christie (Ornella Micheli)
Composer: Franck Wallace (Franco Mannino) … or Francesco de Masi, with Roman Vlad?
Screenplay by Robert Davidson (Oreste Biancoli), Robert Hampton (Riccardo Freda) story by Davidson
Produced by Louis Mann (Luigi Carpentieri, Ermanno Donati)
Directed by Robert Hampton (Riccardo Freda)

So much of film history is now accessible on video disc. We older horror enthusiasts spent ages pining to see Riccardo Freda’s  The Horrible Dr. Hichcock restored to its original luster, so as to justify its place of honor among classics of Gothic Eurohorror. That came to pass two years ago, with twin releases by Radiance Films and Vinegar Syndrome. The ‘breakthrough’ may have been a simple negotiation for a licensing fee.

Luigi Carpentier and Ermanno Donati’s quickie follow-up to Horrible was another story. Nobody could locate the original printing elements for The Ghost (Lo Spettro).  It was considered lost until a recent search found the original printing elements — in Spain, according to expert Roberto Curti. Previously, all we had were limp copies of the English-dubbed version.

Severin’s 4K Ultra HD presentation makes the most of the Eurohorror rediscovery. The label’s earlier resuscitation of Antonio Margheriti’s  Castle of Blood was a welcome release given a good marketing push. The Ghost has been given a much bigger re-launch. It comes in a deluxe 4K multi-disc package, with a documentary on Eurohorror pictures and an extra music CD. Severin’s publicity push enlisted Barbara Steele herself. Late in 2025 the restored movie made a twin ‘re-premiere’ at film festivals in Venice and Paris. That earned big media exposure for a Home Video company specializing in genre films.

Finally seen in a near picture-perfect restoration, The Ghost is nowhere near as sublime as the first ‘Hichcock’ saga. Its narrative is more coherent, but much slower going.

This Gothic outing has no narrative connection to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, unless Cynthia changed her name to Margaret, moved to Scotland and married another Dr. Hichcock, one who also dabbles in questionable medical science. The time period has moved up to 1910. Dr. John Hichcock (Elio Jotta) conducts spiritualist séances in his stately mansion. Put in a trance, his housekeeper Catherine (Harriet White Medin) ‘speaks in voices’ not her own. John is suffering from an undefined creeping paralysis, and has chosen to undergo his own unorthodox therapy. Dr. Charles Livingstone (Peter Baldwin) performs the risky treatment, which involves shocking with an injection of the poison curare, followed quickly by an antidote. But Livingstone and Hitchcock’s wife Margaret (Barbara Steele) connive to kill John with an overdose, in an overt bid to inherit his fortune. All goes well until John is buried and his will is read. The key to the dead man’s safe turns up missing, and Charles and Margaret begin to see and hear frightening phantom phenomena. They now witness Catherine in another trance state, speaking with John’s voice. The spectral voice warns Margaret that Charles will betray her. Margaret also learns that she can retrieve John’s fortune from its hiding place … in the family crypt.

Back in 1963, The Ghost was received in Europe as the work of a master director of Horror. Roberto Curti reports that his reappraisal was the result of articles in the magazine Midi Minuit Fantastique. The cult status of Eurohorror films increased greatly, especially for titles that were unavailable. The cinema canonization of Riccardo Freda became complete in the listings of his films in the 1985 Hardy/Overlook Encyclopedia of Horror Movies. The entry for Lo spettro isn’t stingy with the adulation:

“Free reign is given to a delirious, black romanticism as the camera roams through eerily lit corridors,orchestrating astonishing color compositions, creating a fantasy texture in which lyrical excess clashes with formal classicism and making narrative and spatial coherence fragment under pressure.”

The critics that wrote the Hardy Encyclopedia may not have had access to the movie, as the entry also fumbles a couple of plot points.

U.S. distributors of the 1960s shied away from European horror films with content deemed too strong for America’s ‘family’ screens. The show has no truly extreme content, although a razor slashing may have been trimmed somewhat, and a shot of a rotting corpse in a crypt may have been too graphic as well. There are no innocents in this annihilating Gothic, so there is nobody to root for. Neither does the story feel particularly fresh. Lovers plot to kill an inconvenient husband, which leads to events we’ve all seen before — ‘haunting phenomena,’ grave robbing, secret passages and diabolical illusions. The conspirators turn on one another the moment things go wrong. Add to that a crazy cure for an undefined illness accomplished through chemical shock. The ‘Magna Film Corporation’ eventually distributed The Ghost on a double bill with a German acquisition, Dead Eyes of London, more than a year after its European debut.

The film’s finale is a series of morbid reversals that dispense crude justice and a wicked comeuppance. Robert Curti tells us that both Hichcock pictures were rush jobs aiming to cash in on the popularity of Barbara Steele in Roger Corman’s  The Pit and the Pendulum. This picture tries but can’t equal the grisly, highly satisfying finish of Corman’s film. A few gaping plot holes are left open: near the end of the show, we’re told that some corpse-swapping was performed, but we never find out how the unlucky second cadaver was obtained.

None of that will matter to the fans of Barbara Steele, who is given a coherent character to play — her Cynthia in the previous film mostly wrung her hands and fretted, probably without Barbara knowing why. This time around Ms. Steele has more to do in front of the camera, but she doesn’t get much help from her partner in murder. Peter Baldwin had a more rewarding career as a TV director. His Dr. Livingstone is colorless; all we remember is his handsome ‘Steve Reeves’ beard and mustache. The film’s best performer is Elio Jotta, who manages to look appropriately afflicted when injected with the curare serum. His face is the one seen in the most-published photo from The Ghost, standing in the dark with an expression that makes him look like a ghoul with weird teeth.

The cinematography is attractive, and a couple of Ms. Steele’s costumes are quite good, especially when rendered in warmly-colored 4K definition. Riccardo Freda’s camera blocking is not bad, but the feeling of a slower pace may be because most of the story never leaves a few rooms in the Hichcock mansion. We have an okay funeral scene and a few views outside the window, and otherwise are confined to the well-appointed interiors. Could it be the same villa in which the first Hichcock picture was filmed?  The only space that looks similar is a narrow staircase.

The disc set appears to resolve a controvery over who composed the music heard in the movie, Franco Mannino or Francesco De Masi. But the movie’s actual soundtrack also incorporates several cues taken directly from The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, credited to Roman Vlad.

Severin’s package is really generous with the extras, as detailed below.

Severin Films’ 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of The Ghost pushes Riccardo Freda’s murder Gothic right to the front of horror fans’ wanna-see lists. The Four-Disc Limited Edition gives us UHD and Blu-ray copies of the feature plus a wealth of substantive extras that include a full-length documentary on Italian horror films, and a CD of music by Francesco De Masi.

Two good audio commentaries are included. Critic Kat Ellinger holds forth on the main academic track, and Barbara Steele sounds happy to talk on a second track. Her cumulative interviews and commentaries drop bits of information here and there about her private life — being married to writer James Poe, being ‘with’ director Louis Malle for a period of time.

A special treat is the inclusion of a Tim Lucas telephone interview with Harriet White Medin. She performed in the best of early Italo horror, and holds the claim of starring in Roberto Rossellini’s  Paisan. The interview is a research inquiry from 1986; she tells us that The Horrible Dr. Hichcock was filmed with the actors speaking in the English language. Speaking of Lucas and Ms. Medin, one of our better film-talk memories is witnessing Joe Dante’s interview of both of them on a well-remembered night at the American Cinematheque, in 1993.

A new video documents Barbara Steele and Severin’s David Gregory introducing The Ghost at two film festival screenings last Fall, at The Venice International Film Festival And L’Étrange Festival In Paris. We remember Ms. Steele from the 1970s, when she was rejecting the adulation of her horror fans. It wasn’t until the 1990s or so that she seemed willing to accept her horror work as more than a detour from art film heights shared with Federico Fellini, Volker Schlöndorff and Louis Malle.

We’re big fans of Roberto Curti’s film books, and so paid close attention to his illustrated lecture on the production of The Ghost.  We always learn something from his well-researched opinions … even when speaking, he likes to include where a nugget of information came from. We learn that writer Oreste Biancoli’s first story treatment set the Lo spettro in Switzerland, and finishe with a different stack of macabre ironies. The film is well covered from other equally insightful viewpoints, through video essays by Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Tim Lucas.

We get an original Italian trailer in top condition, and a fully-faded trailer for Magna’s U.S. release. The quality extras are more than enough to fill out a special edition, but Severin’s generosity extends to two more discs. A second Blu-ray contains an 80-minute Italian documentary produced in 2019.  Executioners, Masks, Secrets: Italian Horror of the 1960s is by Steve Della Casa, with input from Dario Argento, Pupi Avati, Barbara Steele and Betrand Tavernier. Its access to film clips is limited but they use them well, starting with  Sei donne per l’assassino and ending with  Nella stretta morsa del ragno.

The extra CD has 7 Francesco De Masi music cues from Lo spettro, including his handsome ‘Scottish’ theme and a very nice theme for a child’s music box, a couple of years before similar Morricone music for Sergio Leone’s westerns. 21 additional music cues are credited to the movies Rapina al quartiere Ovest (‘Robbery in the Western Section’), I familiare delle vitteime non saranno avertiti (Crime Boss), and The Big Game (La Macchina della violenza).

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Ghost
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good + / –
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent English Mono, Italian Mono
4K Supplements:
Audio commentary With Kat Ellinger
Audio interview With Barbara Steele
Italian Trailer
U.S. Trailer
Blu-ray Supplements:
Audio Interview With Actress Harriet Medin And Tim Lucas
Barbara Steele Presents The 4K Restoration At The Venice International Film Festival And L’Étrange Festival In Paris
Interview Till Death Returns with author Roberto Curti
Video Essay On Barbara Steele Wounds Of Deceit by Dr. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Video Essay Give Up The Ghost by Tim Lucas
Italian Trailer
U.S. Trailer
Bonus Blu-ray:
2019 documentary Boia, maschere, segreti: L’horror Italiano degli anni sessanta (Executioners, Masks, Secrets: Italian Horror of the 1960s) (80 mins)
Musica De Masi Compilation CD.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: January 9, 2026
(7452ghos)

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