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Genre cinema has never suffered from what Harold Bloom likes to call the anxiety of influence. On the contrary, horror filmmakers have taken great delight over the years in pilfering unabashedly from their predecessors. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is, in many regards, an ideal case in point, though director Riccardo Freda and screenwriter Ernesto Gastaldi take equal pleasure in delivering their nods with a wink. As its very title indicates, the film engages with Alfred Hitchcock's work in overtly referential manner, but it also explores Hitch's pet themes and obsessions in profoundly disturbing ways.

The story borrows its architecture from Rebecca: In late Victorian London, renowned surgeon Dr. Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) brings his new bride, Cynthia (Barbara Steele), to a lugubrious manse dominated by a forbidding housekeeper (Harriet White-Medin) and haunted by his previous wife, Margaret (Maria Teresa Vianello). But the heart of the narrative comes straight out of Vertigo. Dr. Hichcock's uncontrollable urges are accompanied by washes of deep red that recall Scottie's moments of monochromatic delirium in the earlier film. Where The Horrible Dr. Hichcock moves into unchartered terrain, however, is in its explicit equation of desire and death.

In Vertigo, Scottie's amour fou drives Madeleine/Judy to her doom twice (first by proxy, then directly), but his actions are the stuff of Greek tragedy; for Hitchcock, the wages of desire are as deadly as sin. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock goes further: Only by making the object of his desire into a literal object, an inert thing, can Dr. Hichcock fully possess her.

Raptus, the alternative title of Riccardo Freda's L'Orribile segreto del dottor Hichcock (The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, Italy, 1962) is certainly apt, as its effect on individuals attracted to the macabre is not unlike a rapture or delirium of cinematic pleasure. The atmospheric visuals of Riccardo Freda's masterpiece of sexual alienation and necrophilia stands without precedent in the Golden Age of Italian Horror that virtually seized the Roman film industry from 1956 to 1966.

With more than a nod to the literary influences of Ann Radcliffe and the 19th Century that informed them, L'Orribile segreto del dottor Hichcock is a catalogue of Victorian repressions regarding desire and death, the marriage bed and the grave. The perverse behaviour of our "hero," Dr Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) – much like that of Scottie Ferguson (James Stewart) in Vertigo (1958) or Verden Fell (Vincent Price) in The Tomb of Ligeia (1965) – results in the creation of a fetish-object of desire and death from each of his wives.

Gary Tooze

September 13th, 2016