When fans and scholars of classic 60s horror films mention
the Italian Gothic strain, two names invariably surface: Mario Bava, the
director who spearheaded the Italian movement with the 1960 film, Black Sunday, and its star, the
black-eyed goddess, Barbara Steele who also starred in Black Sunday. Even beyond the horror genre, Black Sunday is hailed as a classic. But to me, Black Sunday is not the definitive
Italian Gothic. That honor goes to 1962’s The
Horrible Dr. Hichcock.
Bava actually owes much of his claim to fame to Hichcock’s director, Riccardo Freda.
Bava was cinematographer on the earlier Freda film, I Vampiri. From Black Sunday
to Whip and the Body and later films
such as Kill, Baby, Kill and Bay of Blood (all of which, by the way,
are worth tracking down and viewing) Bava’s greatest strength as a director are
his overwrought visuals which give his films, rather than story and
performance, their power.
Freda’s ghoulish valentine to necrophilia (written for the
screen by Ernesto Gastaldi) draws a more nuanced performance from Robert
Flemyng as the titular doctor, especially when compared to the hammy
performance of the leads in the similar films Nightmare Castle
and Castle of Blood
The Horrible Dr
Hichcock opens in a London
cemetery in 1885 where an unseen figure dispatches the gravedigger in order to
purloin the body from its coffin. Within the next few minutes we learn that the
brilliant surgeon, Bernard Hichcock, has a penchant for putting his lovely wife
into a drug-induced death-like trance in order to satisfy his peculiar sexual
proclivity. One night, things go horribly awry and Dr. Hichcock discovers he
has accidentally murdered his wife.
Enter Barbara Steele, ever the new bride and target for
Hichcock’s death lust. From this point on the film borrows liberally from
everything from Jane Eyre to Rebecca,
with a few references to various Alfred Hitchcock films thrown in for good
measure (hence the title) as the good doctor tries everything in his power to
introduce Cynthia to his sordid little sex games. Hichcock is filled with the requisite billowing curtains, cobwebbed
corridors, and candelabras held aloft, but you haven’t seen anything until
you’ve seen Steele trapped in coffin with a glass window in its lid.
Like most of the films from the Italian Gothic period, a
decent American print has remained elusive. There is still no official release
in the US ,
but several weeks ago I acquired a DVD from this dealer one eBay. The
letterboxing and color blows away my old Sinister Cinema VHS tape as well as a
DVD purchased from another dealer several years ago. The screenshots here are
direct from this DVD version. Whether you are a collector or curiosity seeker,
if you love pure Gothic cinema, The Horrible
Dr. Hichcock comes with my highest recommendation. If I could take only one
film representing Italian Gothic to a desert island, this is it.
