The terrible secret of Dr. Hichcock
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The terrible secret of Dr. Hichcock |
| Original title | L'orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock |
| Country of production | Italy |
| original language | English , Italian |
| Publishing year | 1962 |
| length | 84 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Riccardo Freda |
| script | Ernesto Gastaldi |
| production |
Luigi Carpentieri Ermanno Donati |
| music | Roman Vlad |
| camera | Raffaele Masiocchi |
| cut | Ornella Micheli |
| occupation | |
| |
The terrible secret of Dr. Hichcock is an Italian horror film in the form of a Gothic horror story from 1962. The British Robert Flemyng plays the title role, directed by Riccardo Freda . At his side is his compatriot Barbara Steele , who has subscribed to Italian horror productions of the early 1960s .
action
In late Victorian London in 1885, Professor Dr. Bernard Hichcock made a name for himself as a recognized doctor. His research area at University College Hospital is anesthesia . Dr. Hichcock's terrible secret is: he indulges in necrophilia , i. H. he only finds satisfaction in sex with corpses. In order to be able to pursue this pathological tendency with his beloved wife Margareta, the anesthetic specialist repeatedly puts her into deep sleep in order to mate her in this state as a pseudo-dead. One day Hichcock makes a mistake with the dosage, so that Margareta rears up again and then dies in his arms. Having become so unwittingly a widower, Hichcock is no longer able to live in this house, because everything here reminds him of Margherita, and so he leaves his home for a long time. His housekeeper Martha is supposed to take care of the house and the cat Jezabel while he is away.
Twelve years have passed and Dr. Hichcock remarried. The name of the much younger lady is Cynthia, and after the death of her father, who had deeply affected her emotionally, he returns with her to his long-orphaned home. In the meantime Martha had not only looked after the house, but had also brought her mentally ill sister here and hid it in a back room. To Dr. Not to upset Hichcock, she promises him that she will find a new place to live for her sister in a mental institution first thing tomorrow. Strange things happened the night they arrived: Martha's sister gave a piercing scream, the rain was lashing against the window, and Cynthia looked out the window and saw a woman dressed in a veil outside, walking away through the stormy rainy night. Then she also hears creaking footsteps in front of her bedroom door and someone presses her doorknob to enter. Cynthia cleverly locked the door.
The following evening, at a social reception after an opera performance, Cynthia met Dr. Know Kurt Lowe, a likable, young colleague of her husband. He takes her home by carriage to the property line of the enchanted Hichcocks mansion. On the way through the overgrown front garden to the house, Cynthia hears an eerie ghost voice warning her that does not bode well. She sees a light through the fog. It belongs to the lamp that the housekeeper Martha, who comes towards her, carries. When Cynthia is about to go to bed, there is a skull under her covers. Cynthia breaks down screaming and faints. Meanwhile, her husband is still in the clinic and is only prevented by a coincidence from following his sexual inclinations again and violating a corpse. When he returns home, Cynthia tells her husband about all the strange incidents she had experienced since his absence, but he doesn't seem to take all of this seriously. Then he will be called back to the clinic. Cynthia sees Martha coming out of a secret passage in the castle. Filled with curiosity, Cynthia enters this hallway located behind a mirrored door and walks it to the end. Meanwhile, back in the clinic, Hichcock is almost caught again by a colleague on duty trying to sexually assault a female corpse again in the morgue in the clinic's basement.
Cynthia has finished the secret passage and ends up in a dark dungeon. A gust of wind blows out the candlelight of her candlestick, and she stands in the dark. Cynthia follows a light and ends up in front of a hiding place, where Martha is still looking after her sister, who has allegedly taken to a madhouse. Back in the main building, Cynthia is waiting for her husband Bernard. He says that she shouldn't go to certain parts of the building. His behavior towards his wife is very cold. Soon he too suffers from hallucinations. Or is what he sees really happening? Someone is playing the piano and Bernard thinks he's seeing his dead first wife. And then suddenly the cat Jezabel appears at the piano. He runs into another rainy night and finds his wife lying on the floor, whom he then carries into the castle. Then Hichcocks goes into his sleeping wife's room and injects her with an anesthetic as well, so that he can then climb on, according to his necrophiliac tendency. Back at the clinic, Hichcock tries to convince his worried colleague Lowe that his wife is mentally very unstable, but the latter tells his boss that she only feels very lonely in this big house and that she feels Margareta's omnipresent presence. At home, Cynthia asks her husband what he did to her last night, but he wipes her disturbing memories of the syringe off the table as an imagination.
Gradually Hichcock is haunted by madness. He wants to kill Cynthia with a glass of milk with poison in it. In a moment of distraction, she pours the contents of the glass into a vase. When her husband has left, Cynthia grabs the glass where there is still a bit of milk and immediately drives to Kurt to inform him of her suspicion that her husband wants to kill her. He thinks this is unthinkable, but is ready to have the remaining contents of the glass checked for poison. Hichcock joins them and takes his wife back to the castle with him. Now that housekeeper Martha has also left the castle, as her husband says, Cynthia wants to flee immediately. But wherever she runs, all doors are locked. Hichcock is already turning the rope with which he wants to hang his second wife upside down. Meanwhile, an older colleague has worked for Dr. Lowe carried out the milk glass analysis and told him that the rest contained so much sleeping pills that one could kill a horse with it. Kurt Lowe then rushes to the Hichcock estate.
A little later, Hichcock put Cynthia in a coffin alive. She tumbles back and forth in it until she causes it to overturn and as a result can free herself. Then she meets a veiled woman she had seen out of the window when she arrived on the rainy night. Without a doubt: it must be the allegedly dead Margareta, who she had obviously seen in the secret room with Martha. As it now turns out, Hichcock's first wife had fallen into a kind of deep sleep and was buried alive because of the overdose administered by her husband. Martha must have freed her from the coffin without Hichcock's knowledge. When Martha Hichcock went mad, Martha, the housekeeper, who was devoted to her, had cared for her for twelve years. Martha kept it in secret and gave the hidden first Dr. Hichcocks and his new wife, Cynthia, as their insane sister. Neither of the two had ever seen the alleged sister.
On the run from the creepy woman, Cynthia wanders through the corridors, comes into the room where her rope is already dangling. The veiled Margareta appears in front of her, and her husband emerges from the background and puts his hands around Cynthia's neck. He hangs her upside down to bleed her to death, on which Cynthia's blood would enable Margareta's eternal life. Meanwhile, Kurt Lowe has reached the property below in front of the portal. He climbs up the house facade and enters the mansion through a window. At the last moment Lowe rushes into the room and is able to prevent the murder of Cynthia. There is a duel between the two men. A candlestick falls over and starts a fire. In a man-to-man fight, Hichcock falls from a balustrade and breaks his neck. Margareta falls into the sea of flames and also dies. From the hell of flames, Dr. Lowe Cynthia outside.
Production notes
The terrible secret of Dr. Hichcock was shot in just twelve days of shooting in a villa in the Roman district of Parioli and was premiered in August 1962 at the Rapallo Film Festival. The mass start in Italy was on August 23, 1962 in Milan. The strip did not start in Germany. It was not published in the Federal Republic for the first time in the form of a DVD until February 16, 2018 . The film is considered a prime example of an Italian gothic horror film.
As expected, the name Hichcock is a reverence and name based on the British Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock . Some passages of the film are strongly reminiscent of Hitchcock's first Hollywood film Rebecca , while others are reminiscent of Roger Corman's Poe adaptation Buried Alive .
Reviews
In the December 3, 1964 issue of The New York Times , reviewer Eugene Archer wrote succinctly : "For once, the adjectives in the title are not only descriptive but also accurate."
England's The Monthly Film Bulletin said the film was “engaging and entertaining”, while the work of Freda and his cameraman Masiocchi created “visually stunning compositions”.
"Eerie, handsome horror with Poe 's undertones."
The following can be read on film.at: “Fredas L'orrible segreto del Dr. Hichcock stands out not only because of his fabulous color direction, but also because of his amazingly direct approach to the perverse. (…) Despite the ironic bow in the title, an actually unheard-of descent into the Victorian abyss, at the same time highly modern as a portrait of sexual alienation. With Lo spettro, Freda had a loose sequel in 1963, in which he deepened the fantastic element. "
Individual evidence
- ^ Monthly Film Bulletin, Vol. 30, No. 348, British Film Institute 1963, p. 160
- ^ Criticism on film.at
Web links
- The terrible secret of Dr. Hichcock in the Internet Movie Database (English)