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Rating: The Italian horror was practically invented by Riccardo Freda in 1956 (I vampiri), but the real birth year should be placed in 1960, when Mario Bava directed La maschera del demonio and established the canons and themes of a genre that, amidst the hostility of the national critics and the enthusiasm of the foreign ones, developed parallel to similar European experiences (the gothics of Hammer) and American ones (Poe adaptations by Roger Corman), finding in Bava, Freda, and Antonio Margheriti three excellent auteur-craftsmen, and in Barbara Steele an actress of unusual and unmistakable charm.
The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock should be framed within this genre, Freda's third foray into horror (but the name is Americanized to Robert Hampton, according to the custom of the time), as well as another essential reference point for the definition of the genre.
In London at the end of the 1800s, Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng), a prestigious doctor, is the inventor of an anesthetic that has the power to induce patients into a state of apparent death. To give vent to his own erotic mania, he administers it to his wife, who mistakenly truly dies. Shocked by the event, the doctor abandons the house and returns only twelve years later, together with his new wife Cynthia (Barbara Steele). Strange phenomena, nighttime noises, and mysterious presences disturb the young woman, driving her to the brink of madness: with the help of a young colleague of Hichcock's (Montgomery Glenn, alias Silvano Tranquilli), Cynthia will discover a series of unsettling truths about her husband, who in the meantime is trying to make her meet the same end as his first wife...
The constant elements of the Italian gothic are all there: a plot full of unusual themes (mostly sexual perversions: in this case, necrophilia, elsewhere it will be incest and sadomasochism), sick and unhealthy atmospheres, an inventive use of photography and color, unmistakable set designs; and an impressive figurative and stylistic elegance, considering that these films were made in just a few days with shoestring budgets.
Particularly noteworthy is the homage to Alfred Hitchcock (made explicit in the distortion of the protagonist's name), especially to Rebecca and Suspicion; but it's not surprising that just the great English director, already a poet of a necrophiliac obsession (Vertigo), is the guiding spirit of such an operation, centered on a character affected by a pathological attraction to death and the corpses of young women, as shown by some relatively explicit and quite shocking scenes for the time (when the likes of Joe D'Amato and Jorg Buttgereit were yet to come).
The other, more obvious homage is to Roger Corman. The late 19th-century setting and the typical scenography (the abandoned manor with its secret passages and dark corridors) come directly from The Pit and the Pendulum, shot the previous year. However, this is far from a mere imitation: it is remarkable rather how Freda emphasizes the subtler, less blatant elements of Corman's cinema and gothic in general, such as the pervasive dreaminess and persistent sense of ambiguity. The almost destabilizing, labyrinthine structure of the space (the dark mansion of Dr. Hichcock is actually a villa in Rome's Parioli district) and the surprising forays into the subjective world of the heroine give rise to a nightmare atmosphere, to which the soundtrack written by Roman Vlad contributes excellently. The climax is the scene of Hichcock attacking an immobilized and narcotized Cynthia, where the husband's face, seen subjectively by the woman, is distorted with a surprising and terrifying optical effect. Less sensational but equally memorable is another scene, where Cynthia screams trapped inside a coffin (a nod to Dreyer's Vampyr?): the viewer sees her mouth move but, in a brilliant device, cannot hear the screams.
Being a film from 1962, delays and naivetés are inevitable, as is the stiffness of the actors, with the exception of the enchanting presence of Barbara Steele in the unusually victimized role for her. But a film like this is the clear demonstration that great cinema does not live by great means alone, and that intelligence, creativity, and culture can well redeem budget constraints: (also) in this lies the value of 1960s horror, and much cinema vulgarly called "B movies."
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