A black screen and some credits, nothing more. I settled comfortably into my favorite corner of the couch, then…a scream! Not a regular scream but one that curdles your blood. I spilled some of my popcorn as I jumped. I looked intently at the screen, the credits continued.  That was the really unsettling thing, a scream without an explanation. The film opens in a dark, foggy cemetery, as a grave digger is burying a body. A second man enters the cemetery, and, without warning, knocks the grave digger unconscious. We see that the deceased is a young woman, and before any other information can be processed, the stranger reaches out and caresses her face. Not in a dearly departed way, but in a heavy breathing, sexually forceful kind of way.

Such is our introduction to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, a film about marriage, medical malpractice, obsession, murder, and necrophilia. I know, right? You can’t even get a cocktail like that today. Starring Barbara Steele, Robert Fleming, and Silvano Tranquilli, this film ranks among the best Italian horror films ever produced. It’s Lynchian and Hicthcockian, with a pinch of Hammer Horror on a bed of darkness in which even the daylight scenes seem dark and foreboding.

After the opening scene we are introduced to Dr. Hichcock hosting a party with his beautiful wife Margaretha. He gives her a knowing look before excusing himself. She soon joins him in an underground crypt, and lies down on a burial bed as if she is dead. The good Dr., meanwhile, is readying a hypodermic syringe filled with a concoction of his own making. He shoots her up as she complies, but this time, something goes wrong.  She appears to die.  So distraught over the experience, the good Dr. leaves the country for several years.

So already within the set up we watch a disturbingly complicit marriage, treated as if they were swingers or participants in an open marriage. By that I mean that the fact that she allows him to drug her so that he can be aroused by her death like state is treated as a matter of fact, very casually. We are strangely aroused by the whole relationship, perhaps due to the alluring Maria Teresa Vianello. Regardless of the reason, we are hooked.

After a few years, the Dr. returns to his estate, which has been under the care of his housekeeper, Martha (Harriet White Medin). He has also brought a new wife, Cynthia (Steele), a former patient, who Martha is not very taken with.

As Cynthia edges toward a psychological breakdown, Dr. Hichcock is succumbing to his demons, and he is doing so in the morgue!!! Perhaps because his transgressions are not in our face, we are able to accept his revolting needs. We do not forgive them or condone them, but we do, in a way, take them in stride. One person not taking them “in stride” is the Dr.’s new college, Dr. Lowe (Tranquilli), who has befriended Cynthia and grows ever the more suspicious of the Doctor. His world is about to come crashing down around him, and a decades old secret is soon to reveal itself!