Welcome to another installment of the annual October Horror Movie Challenge. The goal, as always, is to watch 31 horror movies before the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. At least half of those movies have to be films I haven't seen before.
Film history hasn't been kind to Riccardo Freda. Arguably the father of Italian horror, his star has been eclipsed by his great contemporary, Mario Bava. It was Freda, not Bava, who directed the first Italian horror movie of the sound era, and only the second horror movie ever made in Italy. Bava, a cinematographer at the time, was Freda's main collaborator, and their first film, I Vampiri, was a failure in 1957. The stage had not yet been set for the revival of the Gothic horror film. They were a year too early, a year before Hammer films in England paved the way with the massive success of their Frankenstein and Dracula revivals. When Bava went back to the well with Black Sunday, it was a huge hit. Its time had come. Freda, who had lobbied hard to get a horror movie off the ground, was left behind. His next horror movie wouldn't appear until 1962, and it wouldn't make it abroad until two years later. That film was The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, starring Barbara Steele. Steele is also associated with Bava, but she only made one film for him. She was Freda's favorite collaborator, however, and it was Freda more than Bava who shaped her into a horror icon. In spite of all this, Freda is largely forgotten while the cult of Bava (justifiably) grows apace.
The plot of The Horrible Doctor Hichcock finds the eponymous doctor saving lives at his day job as a surgeon using a revolutionary new anesthetic formula that slows the heartbeat and vital signs in a way that permits more invasive surgeries. In his private life, the good doctor likes to inject his beautiful young wife, Margaret, with his formula before performing his marital duties, an act to which she agrees. One night, he overdoses her and is unable to revive her. She's buried in the family crypt and the good doctor movies away to purge himself of both the memories of her death and of his peculiar sexual appetites. Twelve years later, he returns home with his new wife, Cynthia, in tow. He finds his old housemaid, Martha, still taking care of the place, but Cynthia glimpses another figure on the grounds. This is Martha's invalid sister, she is told, but even after the sister is allegedly packed of to an asylum, Cynthia still catches glimpses. Her husband is no help. Having returned to the scene of the tragedy, he seems a changed man. He is distant, and dismissive of Cynthia's concerns. Cynthia begins to investigate. Her husband, for his part, if feeling old stirrings. When the possibility that Margaret is still alive asserts itself, Cynthia suddenly finds herself in danger from a man she thought she knew, but who she doesn't know at all...
On the surface, this is a full-dress Gothic, complete with a crumbling old castle, secret passage ways, curtains blowing in the midnight wind, and a fair heroine drifting through the night world candelabra in hand. The elements of the story are cribbed from some of the Gothic's greatest hits. This is an amalgam of Rebecca, Gaslight, Suspicion, and The Tomb of Ligeia. But that's all just trappings. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, is a film that brings the psychosexual roots of the Gothic into the foreground and in doing so deconstructs the Gothic as an idiom. In this film, those roots are necrophilia. The kink behind the title character isn't buried in subtext. It's right there in full view of the audience. Part of the film's brazen effrontery comes from the way it dispenses with the Gothic's usual elliptical storytelling. This isn't a film that circles around its central horrors only to come at them obliquely. It's crystal clear that Hichcock gets off on a lifeless sex partner, just as it's crystal clear that Margaret has been buried alive. In stripping away the pretense of the Gothic, it turns any notion of romanticism on its head. This is a sick little film. Indeed, this is the kind of film that wrecks careers if it fails. Its closest siblings along these lines are Michael Powell's Peeping Tom and Bava's The Whip and the Body, both of which place their perverse sexualities in the foreground. Both were failures. Powell's career was ruined, and the lustre came off of Bava's career, even if it wasn't torpedoed entirely (Bava likely got by because his films were so cheap). Somehow, Freda's film was a success in spite of its overtly perverse sexual pathology.
Like Peeping Tom and The Whip and the Body, The Horrible Doctor Hichcock frames its perversity in a jewel-like setting. Both of those films make startling use of Technicolor, and so does The Horrible Doctor Hichcock. Its sets are sumptuous; it's a film that makes the Hammer films that are its contemporaries look cheap in comparison. The sets and the lush color makes for a handsome film, but it's one that leaves a queasy, unclean feeling in the viewer. The film also serves as a showcase for Barbara Steele, who made the film during a ten-day break in the filming of Fellini's 8 1/2. She had already played memorable villains in Black Sunday and The Pit and the Pendulum. This film turns her into a Gothic heroine, which suits her. It doesn't hurt the film that Steele had the "it" quality of a movie star and that she blows everyone else off the screen. Certainly, Robert Flemyng's good doctor never seems genuinely sinister except in Cynthia's dream sequence when his face is distorted and horrible. She's also more than a match for Maria Teresa Vianello's blond Margaret, though they never share the screen. Only Harriet Medin, as Martha the housekeeper (this film's version of Rebecca's sinister Mrs. Danvers) measures up. It's rare when the heroine holds the screen against the villains, but this film manages the trick.
I can only speculate as to why The Horrible Dr. Hichcock has languished in obscurity. Certainly, its ickier subject matter is partly responsible. It's a film that no one really wants to touch, and its long absence from home video is both a cause and an effect resulting from this. While I'm not going to call it a masterpiece, it's a film that stands up to a comparison with most of Mario Bava's films and it's better than most Hammer films. It's a good film, and Freda has always deserved a better legacy than the one he ultimately got.
A note on editions. I watched the version of the film that streams on Amazon Prime as of October 1, 2019. That edition contains all of the credits for the American and English releases of the film in which the Italian crew members were all working under anglicized pseudonyms (Freda, it should be noted, pioneered this practices in this film in particular, blaming the failure of I, Vampiri on foreign markets distrusting Italian filmmakers. He bills himself as "Robert Hampton" here.) When the film was originally released in Engish-language markets, it was cut down to 74 minutes. In spite of the credits, the version on Amazon is the complete 89 minute version.
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