Original title: L’orribile segreto del Dr Hichcock

Riccardo Freda had helped to kick-start the Italian horror film when he at least started I vampiri in 1957, a film he abandoned to be finished by an uncredited Mario Bava. Bava had since gone on to create a marvellous Italian strand of the Gothic horror with the international success of La maschera del demonio/Black Sunday in 1960 that as all the rage in the wake of Hammer’s first few hit films. The Italian Gothic looked to be on the very edge of prematurely petering out until the worldwide success of Freda’s film helped to revitalise it with this utterly gorgeous film that broaches on the last remaining taboos by casting its eponymous villain as an unashamed necrophile.

It starts as it means to go on, with a wonderfully atmospheric sequence in a foggy graveyard. We’re in Victorian London where surgeon Professor Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is experimenting with a revolutionary new anaesthetic that he’s developed. His reasons for working on it are less than altruistic – while they allow him to perform surgery in the toughest of circumstances, Hichcock is a necrophile and uses the anaesthetic to place his wife Margaretha (Maria Teresa Vianello) in a sleep deep enough to approximate death. An accidental overdose results in Margaretha’s real death and the heartbroken Hichcock flees the country. He returns twelve years later with a new wife, Cynthia (Barbara Steele) who is greeted with suspicion by Hichcock’s maid Martha (Harriet Medin, credited as Harriet White). Things start to turn weird as inexplicable events haunt Cynthia – as does, apparently, a withered and aged Margaretha who has returned as a ghost…

Freda and his screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi, here near the start of his long career in popular Italian cinema that would see him writing for Bava (La frusta e il corpo/The Whip and the Body (1963)), Umberto Lenzi (Così dolce… così perversa/So Sweet… So Perverse (1969), Milano odia: la polizia non-può sparare/Almost Human (1974), Il cinico, l’infame, il violento/The Cynic, the Rat and the Fist (1977)) and Sergio Martino (Tutti i colori del buio/All the Colors of the Dark (1972), I corpi presentano tracce di violenza carnale/Torso (1973), Assassinio al cimitero etrusco/The Scorpion with Two Tails (1982)) among others, certainly don’t hold back on the Gothic motifs – necrophilia, black cats, old dark houses, sado-masochism, surgical horror, raging thunderstorms – it has them all. The mix them into a heady concoction that doesn’t show any overt necrophilia but doesn’t go out of its way to hide Hichcock’s distasteful predilections.

They stir in a few references to the other Hi(t)chcock too, the plot in particular echoing that of Rebecca (1940), with a dash of Under Capricorn (1949) and Vertigo (1958) here and there. A slow track into a potentially poisoned glass of milk is straight out of Suspicion (1941), while the influence of Edgar Allan Poe is clear from its scenes of black cats roaming the house, Cynthia being buried alive and a fiery climax that recalls The Fall of the House of Usher. On the other side of the coin, the sight of the white-robed spectral figure roaming the grounds of Hichcock’s mansion could well have influenced similar scenes in Robert Hartford-Davis’ The Black Torment (1964).

The Horrible Dr Hichcock is an eye-wateringly stylish film, beautifully shot, lit (by director of photography Raffaele Masciocchi) and appointed (by art director Franco Fumagalli and costume designer Inoa Starly). The ending is a bit of damp squib, but the rest is an often underrated morbid gem that Freda never bettered (though Lo spettro/The Ghost (1963) comes very close). He bathes Hichcock’s face in Freudian red as Cynthia wakes and finds him leering over her and there’s a remarkable moment later in the film when she sees his face contorting – whether she’s dreaming, hallucinating or Hichcock really is undergoing a physical transformation Fred isn’t saying.

The cast are first rate. Steele was well used to this sort of thing by now and is perfectly fragile as the much-harassed Cynthia. Flemyng is perfectly vile as Hichock, Harriet Medin wonderfully sinister as his maid Martha and the supporting cast is fine. Steele, Flemyng and Meddin were probably cast because of Freda’s notorious dislike of Italian actors (he dismissed them as “lazy” and insisted that everyone, including himself, adopt an anglicised name – he’s credited as Robert Hampton). Silvano Tranquili (as Montgomery Glenn) and Maria Teresa Vianello (as Teresa Fitzgerald) are the Italian actors given the most exposure in the film.

Freda made very few horror films in his career but the ones he did make are all of interest. He’d already partially directed Caltiki il mostro immortale/Caltiki the Immortal Monster (1959) – again completed by an uncredited Bava – and the horror peplum Maciste all’inferno/The Witch’s Curse (1961) and still to come were the gialli L’iguana dalla lingua di fuoco/The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire (1971) and Murder Obsession (1981) and the occult thriller Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea/Tragic Ceremony (1972). They all have their merits but The Horrible Dr Hichcock and its semi-sequel The Ghost remain his finest works in the genre.