The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973)

I first became aware of The Hunchback of the Morgue (1973) in the late seventies or early eighties, finding it referenced in one of the various books about horror movies that my teenaged self eagerly devoured around that time.  At that time, continental horror films sounded incredibly exotic - the horror films showing on UK TV at the time were mainly the old Universal classics, Hammer films from the sixties and early seventies, AIP's Edgar Allen Poe series and a smattering of stuff from Amicus, Tigon. William Castle and the like.  Dubbed versions of Italian and Spanish productions rarely, if ever, turned up - due, no doubt, to the amount of sex, nudity and gore that was frequently on show.  That would certainly have been the case with regard to just about any of Paul Naschy's films of the period, but especially The Hunchback of the Morgue, (which, as far as I know, has never been shown on terrestrial TV in the UK).   It took me many years to catch up with most of Naschy's seventies oeuvre, with Hunchback always eluding me - until this past weekend, when I finally caught up with a subtitled version.  As I've noted many times before, films you have spent years anticipating often turn out to be disappointing when finally seen.  Hunchback of the Morgue, though, most certainly didn't disappoint, turning out to be the utterly bonkers, bad taste, borderline surreal slice of Euro-horror I had been hoping for.

Like Naschy's werewolf films, The Hunchback of the Morgue combines various traditional Gothic horror tropes, as established in the Universal and Hammer films he admired, with new fangled visceral blood and gore and sex.  Naschy, of course, plays the title role, Wolfgang Gotho, a simple-minded hunchback living in a small Austrian town where, when he isn't having stones thrown at him by local children or being taunted and ridiculed by medical students from the local hospital, helps out in the local morgue.  The only positive in his miserable existence is the friendship he has struck with Ilse, a terminally ill patient at the hospital.  When she dies, Gotho loses it completely, killing two pathologists about to, as he sees it, desecrate her body, decapitating one with an axe, before retreating with her body into a labyrinth of secret tunnels beneath the town.  The ancient tunnels also include a number of cells and torture chambers formerly used by the Inquisition.  Forced to defend Ilse's body from hordes of rats - in one of the film's most infamous scenes, in which real rats crawl all over both Naschy and the actress playing Ilse, culminating with several rats being set on fire (for real) by Gotho - the hunchback determines to enlist the help of local mad scientist Professor Orla (Alberto Dalbes) to bring her back to life.  Orla, coincidentally, needs a new lab to pursue his research into creating artificial life, his research grant at the university having been cut off, so moves his equipment into the catacombs.  Inevitably, his research needs lots of fresh corpses, so Gotho finds himself variously digging up corpses, stealing heads from the morgue and committing more and more murders.  Finally, he finds himself forced to abduct young women from the reformatory school (whose existence provides a flimsy excuse for an entirely gratuitous spanking scene) run by the girlfriend of Orla's reluctant assistant.

All the while, Gotho is still waiting for Orla to revive Ilse, which he clearly has no intention of doing, simply stringing Gotho along with false promises so as to ensure his obedience.  Things get worse for Gotho when the Prof's thuggish henchmen, tired of the stench emanating from Ilse's decomposing corpse, dispose of it in the lab's acid bath.  Gotho is not happy, killing the henchmen in an angry rage.  Unphased by this development, the Prof assures Gotho that he doesn't need Ilse's body to revive her - he can create a whole new Ilse!  Gotho, meanwhile, has found another local woman who has a thing for physically disabled crazed killers, this time a doctor working at the reformatory.  Eventually, everyone ends up down in the tunnels as Orla completely loses his mind and the artificial being he has created and nurtured by feeding it human bodies, breaks out and starts rampaging around the lab - it's left to Gotho (and that acid bath) to save the day.  As you can see, Hunchback of the Morgue has it all: mad hunchbacks, crazy scientists, a monster, grave robbing, decapitations, animal cruelty and more than a hint of necrophilia.  Not to mention dank dungeons, labs full of bubbling chemicals and bumbling cops who can't even catch a man with conspicuous physical disabilities.  The references to classic horror movies are abundant, some overt, like the title character's homage to the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Frankenstein-style body snatching, some less so - the catacombs seem to be evoking memories of The Phantom of the Opera - while the mad scientist and his lab is pure classic Universal B-movie.  Moreover, while Gotho's final confrontation with the monster (which, disconcertingly, looks like a man-shaped pile of oozing shit) isn't exactly Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, it is clearly intended to stir memories of Universal's forties 'monster rallies', with multiple creatures running around and duking it out.

In common with most Spanish horror movies of the period, Hunchback of the Morgue eschews the attempts at stylish visuals and striking production design seen in their contemporaneous Italian cousins, in favour of a plainer, more realistic, look.  The Austrian-shot exteriors are certainly attractive - all cobbled streets and overhanging buildings - but are rarely used in such a way as to create atmosphere.  Likewise, the studio interiors, including the catacombs, are straightforward, avoiding ornateness or extravagance in their design.  They are deployed simply as a backdrop to the action, rather than being a 'character; in their own right.  Effective lighting means, though, that they never seem 'artificial'.  Similarly, Javier Aguirre's direction takes a direct approach to delivering shocks and scares - although, surprisingly, he is quite sparing in terms of gore - providing a steady stream of violence, killings and phobias (in particular, fear of rats) to move the plot along.  I recall that, back in the day, the two things in the film that were considered, in the English-speaking cinematic world, at least, especially shocking, were the aforementioned rat scene and the claims that a real dead body was decapitated on screen.  Whilst it is true that permission was given for the latter to take place (in a morgue, obviously), all you see in the film is Naschy drawing a knife across the corpse's throat, with the decapitation itself involving an obviously fake head.  The rat sequence, however, is clearly not faked and remains deeply disturbing as the blazing rats scurrying off screen in pain are obviously real.

 It's clear that the film wants us to see Gotho as a tragic antihero, driven to madness and murder by the cruelty of others and Naschy works hard to try and draw out the sympathetic side of the character.  Indeed, he succeeds in transmitting powerfully Gotho's unrequited love for Ilse, his gratitude for her kindness and his pain at her demise and the treatment of her corpse.  But his transformation from pathetic victim to psychopathic killer is abrupt, weakening audience sympathy, while the relish with which he goes about dispatching enemies such as the medical student who taunted him and disrespected Ilse, further alienates the audience.  The romance with the doctor, moreover, although obviously designed to try and offset his murderous activities, never really convinces - her continued defences of him in the face of her knowledge of incontrovertible evidence of his guilt in the killings, simply doesn't ring true.  Of course, the film tries to maintain Gotho's status as victim by having him, in the latter parts of the film, grave rob and kill at the behest of Professor Orla, rather than for personal reasons, while making Orla crazier and crazier in order to cast him as the true villain and deflect culpability away from Gotho.  But, in the end, the film can never get away from the fact that its central character is a killer - a pretty vicious and ruthless one, at that.  In fact, the film is short on any truly sympathetic characters: Orla is crazy, his assistant weak willed and hypocriticall, the lady doctor blind to Gotho's murderous activities.  Only Ilse is blameless - and she's a corpse for much of her screen time.

For all of its faults, though, Hunchback of the Morgue is, if you can get past the animal cruelty, an entertaining, if entirely off-kilter, horror movie.  It comes over as a 1940s Universal B-movie with added explicit violence, sex, nudity and overtones of necrophilia.  Aguirre moves it all along at sufficient pace that, while it is playing, its absurdities never quite overwhelm it.  Ultimately, the film belongs to Naschy - although he gets sterling support from Franco regular Dalbes, Maria Perschy as Gotho's doctor love interest, Rossana Yarri and Vic Winner - who, despite having to perform his entire role wearing a rubber hump, gives an energetic performance, clambering over roofs and climbing through windows to steal corpses.  While it might not be easy to sympathise with Gotho in view of his murderous activities, not to mention his necrophilia and rat-burning, Naschy does manage to put over the tortured hunchback's inner turmoil and anguish, while also evoking a more tender side to the character in his relationship with the living Ilse.  A memorable performance in a memorably bizarre and feverish film.