RAPTUS: THE SECRET OF DOCTOR HICHCOCK (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

I saw the U.S. cut of this film some fifty years ago and was not moved to watch it again until coming across this DVD release. RAPTUS, though dubbed in English, seems to be the full-length Italian film, written by one of the most prolific Italian horror screenwriters, Ernesto Gastaldi. Direction was provided by Riccardo Freda, whose 1957 I VAMPIRI made Italy a major player in the international market for horror film-production, and though Freda used horror elements in other works between 1957 and 1962, RAPTUS is the second "pure" horror movie in Freda's repertoire. However, my re-watch didn't uncover any hidden complexities in RAPTUS, even with the extra footage.  

Bernard Hichcock (Robert Flemyng) is a rich doctor in Victorian England, living in a mansion with his wife Margaretha (Teresa Fitzgerald). After a few minutes of situational setup, the audience learns Hichcock's naughty little secret. At night he likes to dose his wife with a soporific so strong she appears dead, at which point he makes love to her. The script only loosely implies this, since in 1962 a mainstream movie couldn't do more than imply sex of any kind. However, though Hichcock and Margaretha have obviously done this role-playing game before, the doc makes a mistake and overdoses his wife, causing her to die. The script doesn't spend too much more time in this time-period-- we don't even see whether or not there's an official inquiry into Margaretha's death-- and soon the bereaved physician buries his lost love in a family vault on the property, and leaves his estate for twelve years, allowing the servants to manage the house.

I'm not sure if twelve years was a correct translation. It tutrns out to be an important plot point that Margaretha, like Madeleine Usher before her, did not die but survived and somehow started wandering the grounds, possibly being fed by the servants. However long Hichcock's away, he comes back with a new bride twenty years his junior, Cynthia (Barbara Steele). There's a brief mention that Cynthia recently lost her beloved father and became rather unstable, and under these dubious circumstances she became the second wife of an arguable father-substitute.

I was never sure how much Hichcock knew about his first wife's survival, if indeed he was gone from the estate for over a decade. Yet, as soon as the new couple enter the mansion-- decorated with assorted mementos of Margaretha and supervised by a forbidding maid right out of REBECCA-- Hichcock instructs Cynthia that she must not enter a particular room in the house. Later the doctor tells the young woman that the room holds the old laboratory where he brewed the sedative that accidentally killed his first wife, but this BLUEBEARD-like taboo doesn't have great consequence for the plot.

Though Cynthia gets spooked by the musty mansion and sees a specter that is probably Margaretha, her real peril is not her imagination. At some point Hichcock starts gaslighting Cynthia, at one point wearing a grotesque face-mask to drive her mad. He also imprisons her in a coffin, though in Steele's best scene, the tormented wife escapes captivity. Fortunately for Cynthia, she charms a young medical colleague named Kurt, and he ends up coming to her rescue at the climax. 

Just as the sequence of events is unclear, Hichcock's plan doesn't hold much water. He wants to use Cynthia's blood to restore Margaretha somehow, but it's never clear what's happened to her. RAPTUS possibly enjoys a strong reputation because it was Freda's second horror film and the third one for Barbara Steele, who had made her mark in 1960 with Bava's BLACK SUNDAY and followed that up with Corman's PIT AND THE PENDULUM. Steele is beautiful and the setting of the supposed Victorian house is convincing, but the script tosses out standard Gothic tropes without rooting them in narrative logic (for one thing, the minatory maid just disappears from the movie's latter half). RAPTUS isn't a direct adaptation of any Poe tale, though an USHER influence seems likely. Poe uses a lot of death-imagery in his stories and poems, though I don't recall his sexualizing such imagery in any work except the very early BERENICE. I wouldn't have expected such an early Italian horror film to be that daring. Yet RAPTUS still seems overly tame, even for the early sixties.