Corpse Bride: The Horrible Dr. Hichcock

Nowhere is the essence of Barbara Steele’s cult appeal as the “Queen of Horror” clearer than in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (Riccardo Freda, 1962). An overripe, decidedly kinky Gothic melodrama, the film revolves around the debased appetites of its title character (Robert Flemyng), an eminent surgeon in Victorian London who’s also a necrophile unable to make love to his wife, Margaret (Maria Teresa Vianello), unless he first renders her unconscious with an anaesthetic.  When he accidentally kills her with an overdose of the sedative, he leaves London in grief, returning only years later with another bride, Cynthia (Steele). Shortly after settling into her new home, Cynthia begins to suspect that it’s haunted by Margaret’s malevolent spirit; meanwhile, she becomes the unwitting focus of her husband’s perverse urges, which are rekindled by a beautiful corpse in his hospital’s morgue. Director Riccardo Freda’s gonzo commitment to exploring the amour fou of necrophilia throws into high relief Steele’s dark allure as an icon of death and desire. His movie was far from alone in framing her as an eerily seductive figure. As I have written elsewhere, Steele’s signature “sepulchritude” was cemented by almost a dozen Gothic chillers that cast her as a parade of sultry witches, ghosts, and murderesses in the 1960s.¹ None of them blur the line between the macabre and the erotic as insistently as The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, however. It fashions Steele into a “sort of morbid fetish-object”² personifying “the link between sex and death.”³ At the same time, she emerges as more than just a ghoulish pin-up girl. As in her other genre pictures from the period, her dynamic screen presence lends a sharp, even subversive, edge to the role of a woman oppressed by patriarchal forces who fights back. While The Horrible Dr. Hichcock may not be the most original horror film Steele made in the 1960s, then, it’s arguably the most quintessential.

Legend has it that the movie began as a bet. A compulsive gambler as well as a fast-working director, Freda allegedly wagered producers Luigi Carpentieri and Ermanno Donati that he could have a new picture ready for release in a month. Whether or not this is true, the film’s production was unquestionably frenetic. Returning to the genre that he pioneered with I vampiri (1957), Italy’s first true horror movie, Freda cobbled together the story from a script by Ernesto Gastaldi, who would go on to pen some of the most memorable Italian horror films of the 1960s and 1970s. He also had the good sense to secure Steele, who had made a splash in Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960), her horror debut, and had just been cast in Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963). Using a rented villa in Rome as his primary set, Freda cranked out the movie in a matter of two or three weeks. Steele later remembered: “We worked 18 hour days, charged with Sambuca and coffee. If the dolly broke down, Freda would merely drag the camera on a carpet. Nothing would stop that man.”⁴ As was the custom in Italy at the time, the film was shot without sound to accommodate the multinational cast, who spoke their lines in different languages; the dialogue was dubbed in post-production. Believing that domestic audiences were sceptical of homegrown horror, Freda also gave himself and the rest of the Italian cast and crew English pseudonyms in the picture’s credits and advertising – a strategy that became standard practice in the Italian horror industry in the 1960s. The movie premiered under the title L’orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock and with a new, adults-only “V.M. 18” rating. It did brisk business in Italy and was eventually released (recut and truncated) in the United States as The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, and (more or less intact) as The Terror of Dr. Hichcock in the United Kingdom. The version of the film circulating today under the title The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is Freda’s original cut.

The film is a study in contrasts. On the one hand, its daringly frank treatment of necrophilia aside, Freda’s story has a decidedly familiar, patchwork quality. It draws freely from a host of sources, most of them well-known works of Gothic fiction and cinema. The most obvious of these sources is suggested by the name of Freda’s title character (the “t” was dropped to avoid the possibility of a lawsuit). The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is heavily indebted to the films of Alfred Hitchcock, especially Rebecca (1940), the tale of a young woman who marries an older, wealthy widower, only to find that his home is haunted by the spectre of his first wife. Freda even retains its menacing housekeeper, imposing portrait, and fiery climax. And his homages to Hitchcock don’t end there.  He also weaves in the poisoned glass of milk from Suspicion (1941) and the skull the heroine finds in her bed in Under Capricorn (1949). The work of Edgar Allan Poe is another important touchstone. Stories like “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Black Cat” (1843) provide key plot points in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (a premature burial and a possessed cat), while poems like “Annabelle Lee” (1849), Poe’s ode to love in death, inform its swooning depiction of necrophilia. Freda tips his hat to the mad woman in the attic in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and the unfortunate student trapped in a coffin with a windowed lid in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) as well. The list goes on. He even borrows from himself: Hichcock’s plot to restore Margaret’s beauty and vigour with Cynthia’s blood is lifted straight from I vampiri.

On the other hand, the derivative nature of the narrative is offset by the film’s lavish visual style, which belies its rushed production. The Horrible Dr. Hichcock is a feast for the eyes, with sumptuous art direction, costumes, and cinematography. The best moments in the movie are those when Freda more or less abandons the story in favour of set-pieces that rely on light, colour, and sound to build mood and atmosphere. One celebrated example is the scene of Margaret’s funeral, which takes place during a passing shower. As the pallbearers carry her coffin to the family crypt, followed by a procession of mourners under umbrellas, shafts of sunlight pierce the rain, flaring prismatically. It’s a lovely evocation of the poetry the film finds in death. At times, Freda and cameraman Raffaele Masciocchi flirt with the kind of bold, candy-coloured lighting that would become a signature of Mario Bava’s horror output in the 1960s. When Hichcock succumbs to his taboo desires, for example, they flood the screen with washes of crimson. Elsewhere, they take a more traditional Gothic approach, relying on flashes of lighting or flickering candles to illuminate scenes shrouded in shadow, mist, and rain. Many of these moments are dialogue-free, leaning instead on composer Roman Vlad’s suitably florid score – brooding one minute and frenzied the next – for their effect. The result is a Gothic fever dream that verges on a purely sensory experience, an unadulterated hit of cinema.

At the centre of it all, exerting the gravitational pull of a black hole, is Barbara Steele. Although she doesn’t appear until 20 minutes into the film, she commands our attention from the moment she steps on screen. Her magnetism is partly attributable to her uncommon features – the knife-like cheekbones, the pursed smile, and those large, wide-set eyes. Freda frames and lights them in a way that brings out their Janus-like quality, their ability to seem by turns bewitching and uncanny. Steele’s distinctive approach to acting is part of her appeal as well. It’s been described as an “operatic, gestural style of performance” recalling that of “the silent film diva.”⁵ As in her other movies, her “unmistakable face…moving with extraordinary plasticity through minute variations of gathering terror, mad devotion, seductive coercion, and sadistic glee…itself [becomes] a special effect”⁶ in The Horrible Dr. Hichcock. The fascination Steele exerts in Freda’s film is also, however, a product of the role she plays. It’s not the part of the predatory femme fatale that made her famous in Black Sunday and The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961). It’s closer to the role of the heroine in noirish Hollywood melodramas like Sleep, My Love (Douglas Sirk, 1948) and Sudden Fear (David Miller, 1952): the innocent wife threatened with murder by her gaslighting husband and his gold-digging mistress. Steele consequently spends much of the movie in a state of abject terror, as her character is stalked, drugged, stuck in a coffin, and hung by her feet. But Cynthia is no passive victim. Like the heroine in a Gothic woman’s film, she’s proactive in the face of danger, uncovering the identity of her tormentor and fighting back when she discovers that it’s none other than her Bluebeard-like husband and his supposedly dead first wife. Some of the most memorable scenes of the movie involve Steele peering through keyholes, breaking into forbidden rooms, and exploring secret passageways, a guttering candelabra in her hand. She emerges in the film as perhaps the first modern scream queen – a final girl who faces off against a monster compelled to objectify and violate his female victims, living and dead. The role is tailor-made for Steele, and it’s a kick to watch her sink her teeth into it. 

Steele and Freda worked together just once more, on The Ghost (1963) – a companion piece to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock that flips the script of the first movie. In it, Hichcock (Elio Jotta) is a tyrannical, wheelchair-bound occultist who is murdered by his adulterous wife Margaret (Steele) and her lover, only to exact vengeance from beyond the grave. The production unfolded in the same frenetic fashion, marked by outbursts from the operatic Freda, who often flew into fits of rage and walked off the set when things didn’t go his way. Strangely, Steele responded to his intense method of filmmaking. She later recalled:

It’s difficult to keep the momentum on a picture…when you have these phenomenal pauses between takes. But Freda prevented this by maintaining absolute control at all times with no preparation. You have to feel safe with the director and Freda knew exactly how to keep me in a state of crisis long enough to get what he wanted. I wish we had done more pictures together.⁷

For his part, Freda remained enthralled by his two-time leading lady, once enthusing: “Ah!  Barbara Steele…she’s extraordinary…Sometimes, under certain lighting, with certain colours, she achieves certain expressions that are not human, results that no other actress could achieve.”⁸ In The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, Steele’s uncanny appeal arguably finds its most perfect expression. The film stands as a testament to the strength of her collaboration with Freda and to her status as an icon of horror cinema. 

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962 Italy 87 mins)

Prod Co: Panda Films Prod: Luigi Carpentieri and Ermanno Donati (as Louis Mann) Dir: Riccardo Freda (as Robert Hampton) Scr: Ernesto Gastaldi (as Julyan Perry) Phot: Raffaele Masciocchi (as Donald Green) Ed: Ornella Micheli (as Donna Christie) Art Dir: Aurelio Crugnola (as Joseph Goodman) Set Dec: Franco Fumagalli (as Frank Smokecocks) Cos Des: Italia Scandariato (as Inoa Starly) Mus: Roman Vlad

Cast: Barbara Steele, Robert Flemyng, Silvano Tranquilli (as Montgomery Glenn), Maria Teresa Vianello (as Teresa Fitzgerald), Harriet Medin (as Harriet White)

Endnotes