I Maniaci / The Maniacs

First things first: despite the associations that the title and director Lucio Fulci may suggest today, this is a comedy rather than a thriller or a horror film.

The madness is not that of the black gloved killer but rather of an everyday sort, specifically the ordinary madness of people like you or I – or more specifically our Italian counterparts circa 1964.

Rather than exploring this madness through a single set of characters and narrative, the film is structured around a series of vignettes, most based upon a reversal of expectation.

For instance, a driver races what he assumes to be the car alongside him, taking greater and greater risks as he endeavours to prove his masculine potency, as expressed by his macchina, against his challenger, only to be overtaken by a jumbo jet...

While some of the segments, like this one, work regardless of the viewer’s knowledge of Italian history, politics and culture, it’s probably fair to say that to get more out of the film you really do need to have some background.

For the Fulci fan, aware of his own personal background and politics, the film meanwhile provides some early indicators as to why he never fulfilled his early promise as a specialist in the Italian style comedy and became ghettoised as a cult horror director. Specifically, he was just too harsh and too cynical in his approach, too willing to bit the hand that might otherwise have fed him by criticising both left and right, modernity and tradition.

This comes through most strongly in the segment starring Enrico Maria Salerno as a hypocritical left-wing / avant-garde / intellectual author who advises an old colleague who comes asking for advice to spice up his realist account of partisan activity with extraneous sex, violence and bad language, only to then deny the result publication as inauthentic and immoral; Salerno’s character’s dog is telling called Pier-Paolo, whilst he himself makes apparent allusions to the likes of Accatone and Mama Roma.

Another story, in which a souther hitch-hiker and his northern lift gradually convince themselves that the other is out to kill them, helps illuminate Fulci’s understanding of regional relations, to indicate again that his representations of the south(erner) in Don’t Torture a Duckling were not merely an easy resort to stereotype but something more worked / thought through.

There’s also an anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois skit, as two antique hunters think they’ve bought a load of valuable items from a monastery at a bargain price, only for the punchline to reveal that the monastery buys these as seconds wholesale from the furnishers nearby. The segment also features its own internal running gag, with the monk refusing the various things offered him by the couple on religious grounds, to then decline wine on account of his ulcer.

For those less interested in identifying Fulci’s auteur signature, I Maniaci boasts the attraction of a superior ensemble cast, featuring the likes of Lisa Gastoni, Barbara Steele, Margaret Lee and Franco and Ciccio. It also has a charming pop score by Ennio Morricone, with vocal performances by the likes of Nico Fidenco and Rita Pavone.

I Lunghi cappelli della morte / The Long Hair of Death

Though the title might suggest a contemporary J-horror, The Long Hair of Death is, of course, a 1960s Italian Gothic. Whilst one of the less well known examples of the form, it serves as an ideal introduction to it through the dense network of intertextual references in Ernesto Gastaldi's script and the iconic presence of Barbara Steele.

Set in the 14th century we open with the impending execution of suspected witch, Adele Karnstein, for the sorcerous murder of the local lord, Franz Humbold. It's the usual damned either way trial by ordeal scenario, whereby death will provide absolution. (“Adele Karnstein the hour has arrived. The lord will save you if you are innocent. Be strong and have faith.”)


An almost unrecognisable Umberto Raho as the local witch-finder, here beautifully isolated by the all-encompassing blackness.

Desperately seeking a stay of execution, Adele's elder daughter Helene (Steele) pleads with the new lord, Franz's brother (Giuliano Raffaeli), for a stay of execution. She has evidence that the killer is one of the Count's own household.

Taking advantage of the situation, the Count demands that Helene first submit to his carnal desires. (“What can a man ask of a beautiful woman like you? There is only one thing that I want.”) She does. Unfortunately her mother is burnt at the stake anyway since the one presiding over the execution, the old count's son and the new count's nephew, Kurt Humbolt (Giorgio Ardisson), is the real murderer. As she dies, Adele swears vengeance on her persecutors.


Burn witch burn!

Later, as the distraught Helene flees, she is ambused by the Count, who murders her and throws her body into the river to conceal his own crimes. Helene's death is duly adjudged a suicide.

Left orphaned but exonerated through the deaths of her mother and sister, the young Elisabeth Karnstein adopted by the Count as one of his household in a display of magnanimity which further helps to conceal his family's crimes whilst also allowing him to feel that he has made amends for his own. Unfortunately for the Count, Elisabeth is reminded of her family's heritage by the family's housekeeper, Grumalda (Laura Nucci), who also lets her in on the secret of where her mother and sister's remains are hidden.

Time passes and Elisabetta (Halina Zalewska) grows into a beautiful young woman. Unable to come to terms with his crime and Kurt's revelation of his guilt, the Count has become ill, leaving Kurt in the position where he can do more or less as he wishes, including forcing Elisabeth to marry him.

But, as a plague sweeps across the land as Adele had cursed, a new woman comes into the Humbolt family's life in the form of the mysterious and beautiful Mary Karnstein (Steele). Almost immediately, Kurt resolves that she will be his, with Mary reciprocating his advances. This, however, only leads them to a new problem: what to do about Elisabeth. A dose of poison provides the cure, but then Kurt begins to wonder if his ex-wife is indeed ex...




The usual mirrors drawing into question identity and reality

To now itemise some of the intertextual connections:

The land ravaged by plague aspect recalls The Masque of the Red Death and thus the Corman Poe cycle, although the Christian rather than Satanic rituals that ensue are perhaps more reminiscent of Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

The family name of Karnstein and the arrival of Mary recall Carmilla and, through it, Mastrocinque's film Crypt of the Vampire. Though one of those rare-seeming Italian Gothics those in which Steele does not appear one nevertheless also gets the impression that the role of the vampire revenant was written with her in mind by Gastaldi, whose scenario there also incorporated a family curse for good measure.

The relationships amongst the Humbolt family are reminiscent of those amongst the Menliffe family in The Whip and the Body – itself another film featuring a more obvious Steele stand-in in the somewhat similar looking Daliah Lavi – as is the role played by the Harriet Medin White like family servant here. The film, directed by Bava and scripted by Gastaldi, also happened to feature a villainous black sheep of the family named none other than Kurt.

The return of characters from beyond the grave in search of revenge also alludes to Bava's Black Sunday and Freda's Hitchcock diptych of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and Lo Spettro – both penned by Gastaldi – albeit with a pre-modern tendency to inherently accept of supernatural in a manner that somewhat alien to these films and others with similar later settings, including Margheriti's own Castle of Blood which, whilst not written by Gastaldi, purports to be a Poe adaptation and even incorporates the author into its telling.

Beyond this, we also have some murderous black gloves, an iron-maiden type device – as per Margheriti's The Virgin of Nuremberg – and some point-of-view shots from behind its mask, a la Black Sunday.




Hands of doom

While the film isn't perhaps as atmospheric as some of these counterparts, in that there are fewer sequences of characters wandering through the castle and its environs that exist as much for their own sake as to advance the plot, the upside of this is a less somnambulistic pace that may appeal more to those who find the Italian Gothic at times veers too far in the direction of style over all else.

Some explary moments here arise when Elizabeth and the Count 'coincidentally' decide to venture into the castle's dungeons and catacombs at the same time: As Humbolt plead forgiveness from his dead brother and sees his skeleton move: as he flees in terror the camera lingers on for a moment to allow us to see the rat which has nested within Franz's remains and caused the disturbance, thus reminding us that we cannot just replace supernatural discourses and explanations for naturalistic ones to raise a degree of ambiguity over the nature of the plague soon to descent on the Humbolt lands. Then, as Elizabeth and the Count move through the darkness, they do so cautiously but also at speed, each wary of the possible presence of the other, their haste further accentuated by Margheriti's rapid tracking shots and relatively brisk cutting. Finally, as Elizabeth exits through a secret passage once the Count has passed, she emerges before the awaiting Kurt, who duly professes his desire to marry her and thus neatly moves the narrative on to its next sequence and plot point.


Dead




Undead

Though Steele's role perhaps doesn't stretch her abilities, in that she's incarnating much the same diva type as she had done before and would do again, rather than a more fully rounded real character as in Volker Schlondorff's adaptation of Rober Musil's Young Torless – as the kind of film you suspect she would like to have moved into making, post 8½ – she again brings that distinctive physicality and intensity to the role.

Giorgio Ardisson turns in an effective performance as the dastardly Kurt, the kind of villain with no redeeming qualities whatsoever whom we can be justified in hating, to further demonstrate that he was capable of being far more than just the pretty boy type showcased in Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World and Knives of the Avenger. (As he and Elizabeth are blessed by the priest on the occasion of their wedding, Kurt mockingly asks: “There are many people dying in the streets. Shouldn't you recite a prayer for them?”)

Technically the film is accomplished, with attractive black and white cinematography, solid production design and fluid camera work. Carlo Rustichelli delivers an agreeable if unexceptional score: if its tropes are at times predictable, they help further fix us within the film's distinctive world, having much the same function as James Bernard's work for Hammer in this regard.

L' Orribile segreto del Dr. Hichcock / The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock / The Terror of Dr Hichcock / The Secret of Dr Hichcock / Raptus

The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock is, of course, that he is a necrophile.

It's a theme which showcases the boldness of Freda and other Italian gothic specialists of this time, if we consider that Hitchcock himself – the difference between the two spellings explicable for legal reasons, that Freda and screenwriter Gastaldi were thus not referring to any actual person, living or dead – had declined to make explicit the horrible secret of Vertigo, that “it's about a man who is in love with a dead woman,” except in interview, and the circumspection with which he approached the motives underlying Norman Bates' taxidermy in Psycho given the character's derivation from Ed Gein.

At the same time, hoever, the film obviously isn't as explicit as the likes of Beyond the Darkness, Nekromantic and Aftermath in terms of its depiction of Hichcock's practices, just as The Whip and the Body was less explicit in its depictions of sado-masochism than a Punishment of Anne or Glissements progressifs du plaisir: there were still strict limits in what could be depicted in the early 1960s within a popular / vernacular / genre context.


Another Hitchockian image, recalling Foreign Correspondent

Nonetheless, there is no question that, like Bava's film, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock remains one of the Italian, and indeed world, cinema's supreme depictions of amour fou, and an absolute must for anyone interested in the capacity of cinema to present perverse, sublime and subversive images and ideas.

Indeed, given that the two films were often censored on their initial release, it's clear that they were pushing the envelope for their time, daring to go where most other popular filmmakers had feared to tread, not only in shock-value exploitation content but also for their surprisingly adult, romantic and non-judgemental approach to their subject matter.

This is evident in the early scenes between Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) and his first wife, Margaret (Teresa Fitzgerald / Maria Teresa Vianello). Rather than being a victim, Margaret is presented an equal participant in what we might term their sadomasochistic edge play. If the active / passive, sadist / masochist positions assigned Hichcock and Margaret here appear conventional, such that the mainstream feminist critic might accuse Freda and Gastaldi of being male sadists presenting a woman suffering from a kind of “false consciousness” in her masochistic identification, this remains an unsatifactory critique in a number of fairly transparent ways.

Indeed the filmmakers actually bring broadly psychoanalytic discourses like these into the film itself, with one of Hichcock's students, Dr Kurt (Montomery Glenn / Silvano Tranquilli) later indicating his engagement with the ideas of a certain Freud from Vienna, whilst in discussing the film in interviews Freda also often made reference to Kraft Ebbing's Psychopathia Sexualis and case studies therein.

Likewise, Hitchcock is not so much the conventional mad scientist as a dedicated medical professional whose experiments with anaesthesia have proven of benefit in both his personal and private lives. We do not know which came first, whether he discovered that anaesthetising his patients provoked a sexual response, or whether his sexual adventures with Margaret had unexpected benefit for others in the public rather than the private sphere.

Rather than presenting binary oppositions, the filmmakers thus seem more concerned with challenging them, and with exploring those undecidable areas in between, the slippage between poison and cure in Hichcock's use of anaesthetics perhaps even having something of the quality of the Derridean “pharmakon,” to invoke a theoretical term that comes to mind.


Poison was the cure?

Of course, one could have things another way and suggest that the life-saving operations Hichcock performs on his patients are but sadism by proxy, that a man becomes a surgeon because it gives him a way of legitimately cutting up women. While I have no doubt that there was an element of this to Victorian medicine when unnecessary surgeries such as the removal of the ovaries as a means of controlling 'unruly' or 'hysterical' women are considered, to make such a reading of the film appears an interepretive step too far.

Hitchcock, after all, is genuinely distraught when Margaret dies as a result of an overdose, leaving his home immediately after the funeral and being unable to face returning for twelve years: while he may take pleasure in necrophiliac activities, actually precipitating death through his own actions or inactions is a source of considerable distress.


The housekeeper, Martha, dominated by the image of Margaret; note that on the Italian dub their names, Margaretha and Martha, are even closer than in the English subtitles.

Indeed, we might wonder how much simpler his life would have been were he a stock psychotic killer type whom we, as viewers, could then place at a safe distance, as something and someone apart from ourselves; think here of Flesh for Frankenstein with the connotations of the Warhol and Morrisey names and their camp approach actually lessening the extent to which their film really challenges. Put another way, you – i.e. the implied art cinema elite – watch Warhol to show how superior you are, even if the joke may well be just as much on you.

Yes, I like that film's jokes about “fuck[ing] death in the gall bladder” and on the distinctive nasum of the ideal typical member of the Serbian master race as much as the next person, but also find it hard to get away from the sense that Morrisey didn't really have as much genuine feel for a popular form as, say, Polanksi with Dance of the Vampires.

On Hichcock's return he has a new wife, Cynthia (Barbara Steele) to whom his devoted housekeeper Martha, who had remained in the house during his years of absence, appears to take an immediate dislike, recalling the character of Mrs Danvers in Rebecca; we also soon after learn that Cynthia's marriage was preceded by a breakdown following the death of her father, hinting that Hichcock represents something of a substitute father for her.






The Woman at the Window, seeing the woman in the garden

Before long strange things start to happen in and around the house. Cynthia sees a female figure in a shroud in the garden near Margaret's crypt. A phantom or just an overactive imagination or trick of the light given the ferocious tempest outside? Later that night she hears what footsteps in the passage outside her room and sees the handle turning, though her husband, whose room is adjacent, professes to have heard nothing.








Martha frequently appears as if out of nowhere, like a phantom

Later, exploring the house, Cynthia finds a locked room that Martha seems rather overly protective of and, returning alone after a visit to the opera when her husband is called away to the hospital, hears a figure calling to her from the fog, proclaiming that “death will catch you as you sleep” to foregrounding another of the film's major themes, the slippage between different states of unconscious being in that to die / to sleep / to sleep perchance to dream manner.


Memento mori

Maybe the voice was that Martha's insane sister, mentioned in passing earlier as yet another ingredient in the gothic stew, but the servant claims to have taken her to the asylum earlier in the day.

Something is clearly going on, however, as testified to by Cynthia then discovering a skull in her bed, a shock moment that allows the filmmakers to reference yet another Hitchcock film, Under Capricorn, just as later a glass of milk will allude to Notorious as it becomes the pivotal element in the mise en scène and the unfolding drama.


The glass of milk

Meanwhile, one of Hichcock's patients has just died in surgery, primarily because he declined to use his anaesthetic: “I shall never use that aneasthetic again. It isn't perfected yet. It can be fatal.”

As the woman's body, covered by a sheet, is led away, Hichcock looks ambiguously at it, a cut to him at home where he then attempts to drown his sorrows once more indicates the lasting consequences of Margaret's traumatic death.

Yet, as Robert Flemyng's wonderful facial tics suggest as Hichcock drinks, he is also desperately trying to suppress the thought of the woman's corpse in the morgue, as yet more memories flood back in a near Proustian manner. Or, as his student's mentor Freud argued, the repressed will return one way or another...

Taken in its own terms as a work of delirious romantic excess, where everything is about overwrought emotion and atmospherics, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock is an unqualified success, even a masterpiece, in which every element contributes to the whole.

Thus, for instance, though we might quibble about the Italianate appearance of Hichcock's house and the near absense of any other real locations apart from the hospital, the former and the mix of location and studio work also serve to give a suitably uncanny cast to the proceedings and the lack of much sense of the wider metropolis to emphasise Hichcock's growing obsession and the concomitant isolation of his new wife.

Indeed, the one exception to this general pattern, which sees the Hichcock's attend a concert and thus meet other members of society and his colleagues, is itself a pivotal moment in the film by confirming the doctor's inability to really rejoin this world, his wife's concomitant isolation cum encagement and generally setting everything else that follows in motion.

Freda's direction is superb, his camera movements and choice of set ups always telling. He uses close-ups and zooms sparingly and thus more effectively than in some of his later works. Besides the customarily excellent use of light and shadow, fog, and flashes of lightning to momentarily (overly) illuminate a scene, he and his collaborators also make excellent use of colour and production design more generally.


An almost irridescent image of a phantom like Steele




More images of Margaret dominating over Hichcock and her replacement, Cynthia

The Hichcock house is dominated by heavy, subdued colours and a number of portraits of Margaret, the hospital by a sterile whiteness, thus allowing the more obviously stylised, expressive and poetic uses of colour at key points to really stand out. Here we might note, for instance, the flashes of red as Hichcock passion builds or the sickly Vertigo-esque green of the secret passages investigated by Cynthia.












The red of Hichcock's rising passion

The performances are also note perfect, a fact that is all the more vital considering that there are only really five characters in total, two major and three minor.






La signora in verde

Though he might have expressed misgivings about the subject matter, British actor Robert Flemyng's portrayal of Hichcock is genuinely powerful, not so much stiff upper lip as quivering and bitten lower one, as he fights, again and again, against the weight of his past and emerging future...

Whilst Steele is here limited to portraying the light / victim side of her persona and perhaps doesn't do anything we hadn't seen before or wouldn't see again in her other Italian gothic roles, that ineffable facilty for these roles that she possessed again, that inimatable something, again comes through even as at times Cynthia's propensity to faint at the merest provocation foregrounds the character's stock origins.

Here, it's also an interesting thought experiment to try to imagine what the film would have been like had Steele played both Margaret and Cynthia: if the Hichcockian transference motif would have been then stronger, this would have been at the expense of subtlety elsewhere, that we would then have known from the outset why Hichcock had remarried after all these years and that he was not over Margaret but had rather at last found her reincarnation and / or someone who could be refashioned in her image a la Vertigo.

Freda and Gastaldi are engaging with the Hitchcockian in their own terms, rather than merely imitating. Or, to note a neat coincidence, given the importance of anesthesia in their film, it's worth mentioning in passing that Hitchcock's first published piece of writing, a short sensation narrative, was itself an account of an anaesthesia inspired nightmare, in the style of Poe. There is really nothing new under the sun – or the moon for that matter...


An image of premature burial, after Poe

Harriet White was making a career out of playing sinister governesses and housekeepers at this time, and as such has the withering glance and the curt delivery down to an art.

Teresa Fitzgerald beautifully conveys the secret life of her Victorian lady through gestures and expressions that are initially enigmatic – what are her smiles anticipating – and then convey a sublime bliss followed by “the tempestuous loveliness of terror” as the games goes wrong.

Montgomery Glenn rounds things off with a fine, if necessarily somewhat bland by comparison performance as the dashing romantic lead, a figure who represents one of the film's few concessions to convention.

Yet, if the eventual resolution is not as perverse as some might wished, there is little question that the film is a triumph, the whole being topped off by Roman Vlad's lush, romantic score with a lyrical passage or sweeping crescendo to complement each and every image, pushing the whole from melodramatic to operatic intensity.

In a word, unmissable.

[Having previously only seen The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock through a washed out print – though I retrospectively realise that part of this washing out was a reflection of the film's distinctive use of colour – and a somewhat fuzzy VHS source, both in English, this AVI in Italian with custom-made English subtitles came as something of a revelation. It is available from Cinemageddon.]

Un Angelo per Satana / An Angel for Satan

This was one of two gothics directed by the veteran Camillo Mastrocinque, following on from the Carmilla styled Terror in the Crypt. Adapted from a novella by Luigi Emmanuelle, whose other writing credits include the story for the spaghetti western This Man Can't Die, it's an atmospheric and effective piece with some exceptional images and strong performances that's well worth a look for any enthusiast of the form who values subtlety over shock.

Set in the late 19th century in a remote Italian community, the the story begins with the arrival of young artist Roberto Merigi (Anthony Steffen) by boat. He's been commissioned by Count Montebruno (Claudio Gora) to restore a statue that's recently been recovered from the lake.

Legend has it that the statue bears a curse and, indeed, no sooner has Roberto arrived than the boat that brought him in sinks on the lake with the loss of all aboard.


An almost neo-realist image

As a modern man, however, Roberto puts this down to coincidence. His attitude contrasts sharply with that of the superstitious villagers working the Montebruno estates. The most notable of these is the fearsome Carlo Lionesi (Mario Brega) who does not take kindly to Roberto's sketching and accuses him of having the evil eye, leading to a brawl that comes uncomfortably close to western territory – especially when we consider the two combatants' associations with the spaghetti genre.


An almost spaghetti western image – Brega confronts Steffen

Fortunately things are soon back on the Gothic track as, with the arrival of the Count's adoptive ward, Harriet (Barbara Steele), from her school in England the story really kicks into gear.


The statue


And Steele


The resemblance is striking

For Harriet is not only the spitting image of the statue but may be its reincarnation or possessed by its spirit, as she starts to manifest a split personality, alternating between her own demure and frightened self and the cruel, sadistic Belinda to unpredictably turn to and on Roberto, the Count, Carlo and the other men around her...






Another beautiful transition, from an eerie painting to the statue

It's impossible to imagine An Angel for Satan working quite so well with any other actress in the Harriet / Belinda roles. Steele was quite simply born to play these dualistic parts that made the most of her unique features, that strikingly expressive mask which provided her with an unsurpassed capacity for switching from victim to monster, masochist to sadist, object of the gaze to its bearer, with a little curl of the lips or movement of the eyes.






The many faces of Steele - vamp, sadist and innocent victim

The real surprise among the performers is thus Steffen who, clean cut and frock coated rather than unshaven and scruffy, presents an almost entirely different persona to his other period appearances, more talkative than taciturn, yet still full of the same self-assuredness – that spaghetti brawl, though it at least resolves differently and slightly more realistically than in one of his Django type roles – at least to begin with.

Indeed, the film as a whole is marked by this distinctive combination of the gothic and the realist, where a storm at an (in)opportune moment may be natural or supernatural, a chess game knight move followed by a checkmate potentially symbolic, all the way through to an ambiguous ending that is the very definition of the fantastique.




Making connections, and another Steele double image

Mastrocinque plays up these coincidences or connections in his compositions and editing, frequently cutting or dissolving between matched images – the statue and Harriet / Belinda, Harriet / Belinda and the Count both looking at themselves in the mirror, a painting and the statue etc.

The icing on the cake is provided by Francesco De Masi's lush romantic score, full of drama and emotion and providing yet another illustration – if any were needed – of just how versatile Italian film composers of the period were in adapting their idiom to suit the film at hand.

Lo Spettro / The Ghost

Dr John Hichcock is not a well man. Confined to a wheelchair by illness, he survives only due to regular injections from his friend and fellow physician Dr Charles Livingstone. What is worse than his physical condition, however, is his mental one. “Just a living corpse,” and increasingly obsessed with a world beyond this one, Hichcock wears himself out in séances and repeatedly makes suicidal gestures.

Finally tiring of Hichcock's antics, Dr Livingstone and Hichcock's younger wife, Margaret, decide that it would be best for all concerned if he be allowed to die: his suffering will be at an end, while they will no longer have to carry on their affair in secret and will doubtless inherit the considerable estate.




“One day you might regret that you stopped me from killing myself” – Elio Jotta as the sinister Dr Hichcock and Peter Baldwin as Dr Livingstone

One night Dr Livingstone thus fails to give Hichcock one of the drugs he needs, leading to his death. Hichcock's body is interred in the family tomb, and the will read, which presents Margaret and Charles with a nasty surprise, Hichcock having unexpectedly left the majority of his money to the local orphanage.


The two lovers in a not-so secret embrace; the blue light is a recurring visual motif

Worse follows, as the key to Hichcock's safe cannot be found. Housekeeper Catherine, who had earlier acted as a medium for Hichcock during the séances and has a habit of creeping onto the scene at inopportune moments, suggests that it must have been buried with him.

While Hichcock's body is in his coffin (and is in fact decaying faster than usual, on account of his treaments) a series of inexplicable apparitions compel Margaret and Charles to consider the possibility that his spirit lives on and is haunting them...

Despite seeing director Riccardo Freda – billed under his customary Robert Hampton name – reuinted with Barbara Steele and Harriet White and again featuring a character by the name of Dr Hichcock, Lo Spettro / The Ghost is a not so much a sequel to The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock as a reconfiguration.








Compare to the barbershop sequence in The Cat o' Nine Tails

With White again playing the sinister housekeeper that was her stock-in-trade, the main difference lies in Steele's role, less the innocent victim than her more usual victim-or-victimiser role.


The moment of decision – the two lovers' hands and the syringe

The model in this instance, given the Scottish setting, the recurring motif of bloodstains and references into the dialogue to “what's done cannot be undone” would seem to be Lady MacBeth, with Margaret the one who first takes the initiative and makes the fateful decision, but then finding having the greater difficulty in coming to terms with the deed – as much because she is our main point of identification and the primary target of Hichcock's wrath as anything else.


La vedova

While the visible manifestations of Hichcock – the figure at the window that then slowly advances on Margaret, the drops of blood that lead Livingstone to his hanging form and so on – convince, those in which only his voice is heard are less so. This is not, however, perhaps so much a failing of the filmmakers themselves, each manifestation being suitably uncanny / unheimlich, as a combination of the technological limitations upon them at the time and the phenomenological perspective I tend to take here.

In terms of the former, it is the way in which Hichcock's booming voice seemingly emanating from Catherine's mouth as she seemingly speaks in a trance really needs that 5.1 Dolby mix, even as the inclusion of such would then result in further complications if it in fact turns out that Hitchcock's ghost is not “for real” precisely because of the absence of such technology at the time the film it set.










Manifestations of Hichcock's ghost

One point of comparison here is Argento's Trauma, with its exposing the machinery by which medium Aura Petrescu invokes the spirits, as a complex, modern machinery of tape recorders and speakers capable of deceiving the ear in a way that wax cyliners and horns perhaps could not.

Then again, the extent to which we experience sound as naturalistic or artificial is also highly contingent, with it certainly within the realms of possibility that the uncanny nature of the acousmatic voice would be enough of a shock to the Victorian or Edwardian hearing it for the first time for other matters not to enter the equation. One also thinks here of the stories of audiences recoiling in terror from the Lumiere's L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. The flatness of and absence of colour and sound from the image evidently did not prevent it from seeming real, an indication of the importance of belief that is all the more significant in a fantastique narrative such as the one presented here. (To introduce another relevant Shakespearean reference point, Hamlet, the issue is that of distinguishing between the real and that which only seems to be such, a situation inevitably complicated by the power of belief to here make the supernatural real and / or real in its consequences.)

In terms of the latter, it is all the other sensory information that is not quite brought into play, in that Margaret would presumably have some notion of where Hichcock's voice was emanating from by virtue of her embodiment and the information coming from her entire sensorium – a multi-sensory, cinesthetic approach that the filmmakers elsewhere succeed in evoking / invoking, not least in Margaret and Livingstone's visible and palpable revulsion at the sight and, perhaps just as importantly, smell of Hichcock's decaying flesh.

This is also, however, about the only thing I can really find to criticise about the film.

Production values and performances are good, even with the usual limitations of dubbing, and the filmmakers' evocation of small town Scotland, 1910, surprisingly effective, the shift in locale making it easier for them to convince us of its reality as compared to the London metropolis of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock or the Paris of I Vampiri.

The character of Canon Owens, the voice of presbyterian morality and a consistent chorus on the action, voicing his and / or the community's disapproval at Hichcock's unorthodox beliefs and experiments prior to his demise, and at Livingstone's staying at the house subsequently, is particularly convincing in this regard.

True, the professional historian could probably find little details that don't quite ring true, but in this it's no different from a Hammer horror film of the same time (are Dracula's Holmwoods in mittel Europe or middle England?), with the general look of the film, with lavish on a budget production design and expressive use of colour and lighting, serving to further strengthen the comparison.





Harriet White's housekeeper creeps up on Barbara Steele yet again

One significant difference, however, is that the physicality of the Hammer gothic would seem to have largely precluded uncanny scenarios. Hammer monsters tended to be (corpo)real and dealt with as such by the savants (i.e. the palpable sexual threat Dracula represents is countered by the prophylactics of stake and crucifix), it being their mechanical thrillers such as Taste of Fear or Paranoiac that are of more interest as a point of comparison for the ontological and epistemological questions of the sort found here.










Do you remember? Is it real or all in her mind?

More importantly for the typical viewer less concerned with such theoretical and metaphysical speculations, there's a care evident in the writing and direction, with scarcely a line or shot being wasted. Note, for instance, how Margaret's admonition to her hisband whilst performing the daily ritual of shaving him, “Don't move darling, or I'll cut you,” prefigures a later razor slashing that still has the capacity to shock. Or take the way in which the opening credits, playing out over a séance, finish up on a skull, as the naturalistic introduction of a symbolic memento mori that will recur, along with a number of other key fetish objects, like the bottle of Dutch gin and the music box, to “bring back memories” in an almost Proustian way.

Again it is not hard to see Freda's influence on Argento, even if the way in which the two filmmakers approach these fetish objects is somewhat different, Freda more inclined to establish significance through words what Argento does through images, the kind of hyper-realistic defamiliarisations found in Deep Red have no obvious counterpart here.




“Out out, damned spot” – will Margaret's hands ever be free of blood?

One question remains: when Canon Owens offers his summing up, that “the Devil is a very real person,” to whom might he be referring amongst the protagonists? Specifically, is the Devil incarnate as woman or man?

The film is available on US NTSC DVD from Retromedia, and comes double billed with Alfred Vohrer's Dead Eyes of London.