‘There’ll Be a Different Kind of Victim Tonight’: How Hammer Films created a surprisingly positive trans horror in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)
Please be warned, spoilers for Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and Dracula / Horror of Dracula (1958) lay within (and if you’re one of these people who thinks that there’s some kind of time limit on spoilers, well… that doesn’t make sense. People can only watch a movie when they watch a movie, and it doesn’t matter whether it's a day old or 100 years old, if they’ve not seen it, then they’ve not seen it, end of).
‘I walked the streets, brooding on the bitter irony that all I wanted to do for humanity, for life, would be cheated by death…’
In 1957 a small British production company produced and released a relatively low-budget Gothic horror movie based on Mary Shelly’s iconic and influential 1818 sci-fi horror novel, Frankenstein. Starring British television star Peter Cushing as the infamous Doctor Frankenstein, and a then relatively unknown Christopher Lee as his creation, Hammer’s The Curse of Frankenstein essentially kickstarted a sort of classic horror revival, a renewed interest in Gothic fiction, and directly led the studio down a path that would see the brand of Hammer become synonymous with the horror genre.
The team would reunite multiple times over the next decade and change, taking a stab at basically any classic monster they could get their hands on; werewolves, mummies, and, of course, Dracula, became Hammer Studio’s bread and butter, and while they would ultimately wind up falling behind the times when American horror cinema found its footing once more, there’s no denying that Hammer’s legacy is one that casts a long shadow over horror cinema, even today.
But for all the praise and recognition the studio gets for their “boobs and blood” approach to the genre, modernizing a kind of film and story that — at least at that point in time — had become viewed as somewhat old-fashioned, less is said of the way the film-maker’s actually adapted and revitalized the classic stories from which they were working.
For example, it’s easy to point to the opening sequence of 1958’s Dracula (or Horror of Dracula, as it was retitled for U.S. audiences) — in which the camera eerily tracks through a shadowy tomb before resting on the titular monster’s name etched in stone, while brilliantly vibrant red blood (now in glorious technicolor!) splashes down on it — as a prime instance of the studio’s gory trend-setting. And it is. But what really gave Hammer their success, at least in my opinion, was that their films “worked to engender progressive forms of ideological awareness through the utilization of traditional generic cinematic structures as a method to subvert a conservative value system” (Wilson, B. 2007). To put it simply; Hammer was kinda woke, y’all!
Now, of course, if we are to hold the studio’s output to today’s social standards we’ll see them crumble dramatically, but during the time Hammer’s movies were legitimately progressive and fairly liberal in their attitudes and representation. Seriously.
Let’s use the aforementioned Dracula as an example; while Universal’s original 1931 take on Bram Stoker’s iconic story, despite its many major deviations from it, essentially doubles down on the novel’s take, “in which the Count represents evil, the unknown, […] and the threat of the foreign” (Guia, P. 2016), in Hammer’s film, adeptly brought to life by director Terrence Fisher, Lee doesn’t even bother with an accent — perhaps the most recognizable facet of Bela Lugosi’s performance — blurring the line between him and the stuffy old Brits he ultimately finds himself at war with. Instead of a mysterious (and frightening, apparently) foreigner, Lee presents his Dracula as equal parts charismatic gentleman and manipulative, vicious puppet master, cool and collected all the way up to the moment that he isn’t, when he abruptly and unexpectedly turns, becoming almost rabid and monstrously animalistic.
In Hammer’s (then) modernizing of the tale, the titular Count becomes a kind of parasitic and insidious aristocrat. He’s Marx’s vampiristic vision of capitalism made flesh. Marx wrote that “capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. Hammer’s Dracula literally feeds on the lower classes, before later pouncing upon the British upper class, echoing Marx’s assertion that “its own colossal productivity would bring capitalism to its knees” (1867). Dracula, as seen in the ’58 film, is the very manifestation of the idea that capitalism will ultimately wind up eating itself.
And then, of course, there are the women!
Relegated to mere pawns in Todd Browning’s 1931 classic, Hammer reshapes them as characters with agency. That’s not to say that Hammer was all that progressive when it came to its depictions of women — after all, we are talking about a studio that was as infamous then as they are now for their scantily clad female icons — but they certainly brought more to the table on that front that many others before them. The allure of Dracula in the Hammer movie becomes not so much the inescapable brainwashing of Lugosi’s villainous vampire, and rather an inviting offer of sexual liberation.
As Roman Buttner puts it in his book, The Role of Sexuality in the British Vampire Films by Hammer, “the act of biting is presented as a highly sexual moment with the victims becoming paralyzed, calm but excited both at the same time” (2004). Indeed, when Dracula finds Mina — played by the stunning Melissa Stribling — in her bedroom late in the film, the scene is played out like a seduction — “made much more evocative in colour through the addition of Mina’s deep-red lipstick and an increased sense of her state of undress when flesh tones are held in contrast to her plain white night-dress” (Firth, P., 2018) — and it is one that Mina ultimately willingly engages in.
In my opinion, the true key to Hammer’s success was this emphasis on progressive attitudes, taking these classical, traditional, and often conservative stories and twisting them into something more in line with growing societal expectations of the time. It was when American cinema caught up with the progressiveness (and the gore, let’s not forget the gore), that Hammer really started to lose their hold on the horror top spot. Still, their progressive attitudes shouldn’t be overlooked, and considering all this took place in the late ’50s through to the ’70s, they were pretty damn good at it too.
But, while their earlier output felt consistently ahead of the curb — in his review for the movie in Motion Picture Daily, Vincent Canby wrote, “it’s chillingly realistic in detail (and at times as gory as the law allows)” — as time wore on there’s no denying that the studio slowly began to fall behind. Arguably, it was Tobe Hooper’s 1974 nightmare The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that acted as the final death blow for Hammer. That movie's adept tackling of contemporary social and political issues, as well as the grim, grimy nature of the movie, essentially left the British studio scratching their heads in bemusement. While they had been the new kids on the block some 20 years earlier, they were now themselves the outdated, old-fashioned classics they had once so expertly breathed life into. This led to a scramble behind the scenes as Hammer desperately tried to find new and innovative ways to shock audiences and to bring their unique and progressive takes on classic horror up to date. This is all an admittedly very long-winded way of explaining perhaps how we wound up with such a strange and peculiar oddity as Roy Ward Baker’s 1971 blackly comedic entry into the Hammer canon, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde.
It’s a strange case, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (geddit!?), because, in terms of a trans reading, it’s both incredibly problematic and negative in its representation of transness, and yet also a weirdly positive and surprisingly progressive take on such a complex and difficult issue. Now, I’m not sure how much credit we can give the film-makers for their unusually insightful portrayal of transgenderism — the film’s writer, Brian Clemens, was perhaps best known for, among others, The Avengers (the British television spy series, not the Marvel behemoth) and the anthology television series Thriller (1973–1976), which is a lot of fun, but features its fair share of troublesome gender stereotypes — and so it stands to reason that the same can be said of the more negative aspects too.
As is almost always the case with horror movies — and movies in general, for that matter (especially Hollywood) — ‘trans’ characters aren’t necessarily trans characters. This can be confusing because so often film has a tendency to conflate any kind of gender ‘issue’ with transness. As Austin H. Johnson puts it in his essay, Transnormativity: A New Concept and Its Validation through Documentary Film About Transgender Men, the term ‘trans’ is, by and large, “used interchangeably” and essentially “refers to individuals whose gender identities are incongruent” (2016).
This matters because, as I covered briefly in my piece on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic proto-slasher Psycho (1960), audiences tend to conflate these things, just like the movies that present them. While with Psycho we can clearly see that Norman Bates isn’t trans, he is still coded trans regardless, Dr Jekyll — played by Ralph Bates — in Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a little more complex (and that is weird because, in the world of film, Hitchcock is generally regarded as being far deeper, smarter, and more academic than basically anything Hammer was churning out).
Still, there is a question mark hanging over Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde. Is Dr Henry Jekyll really a trans character? At the beginning of the film, he doesn’t seem to have any interest in changing his gender, and any interest he does ultimately wind up having is entirely circumstantial. However, he does seem to embrace and then eventually desire to become the opposite sex, at least in certain key moments throughout the film. And there always needs to be some inciting incident, after all. Moreover, he enjoys becoming female and toys with the societal expectations that this gender swap brings with it. I’ll get into it all a little later, but at the very least there is a definitive transition. Indeed, the film even features a transformation sequence, one that is superbly executed and still kind of baffles me as to how it was done (I’m guessing fake mirror?).
The moment directly after said transformation sequence is also interesting in the whole ‘is Jekyll trans or not’ debate. He, now as she, approaches the mirror to study her reflection. Upon discovering her breasts, there seems to be a sort of pleasure and titillation within herself as she touches them and observes them in the mirror. Later, after seducing the brother of Jekyll’s love interest, Howard Spencer — played by Australian film, stage, and television actor Lewis Fiander — Jekyll as Hyde gleefully muses out loud who will “win” in this twisted love triangle. There is a strange sort of pleasure drawn from the character’s desire to toy with gender expectations. As Hyde, Jekyll is presented as traditionally feminine, heterosexual, and cis, and yet she is demonstrably not these things because… well, she’s Jekyll.
Jekyll, however, is not bisexual — at least, we never get any suggestion that he may be within the context of the film outside of the sequences in which he is Hyde. Moreover, Jekyll/Hyde is presented, for the most part, as more of a single entity than Bates/’Mother’ in Hitchcock’s Psycho. Here the transness really shines through. Regardless of how you choose to read the character though, the simple fact remains that Jekyll/Hyde is coded trans. Like so many before and since, they are a character that falls into that ever-changing, ever-confusing ball of movie trans, which encompasses any and every character that, at some point or another, differs from their gender as assigned at birth.
Whether the folks over at Hammer bothered to consider any of this is questionable; though their intent is ultimately irrelevant when it comes to readings of the film. Jekyll is Hyde. Hyde is Jekyll. They are coded trans and therefore, as far as film and film audiences are concerned, they are trans. And there’s little doubt, at least in my mind, that this was a purposeful attempt at modernizing and updating a classic text for then-contemporary audiences, and was also likely Hammer attempting to capitalize on a then-growing awareness of the LGBT+ community.
Hammer’s niche was, arguably, in their controversy. Whether this was by way of the soft-core porn-ish nature of a lot of their movies, the excessive (for the time) violence and gore — “boobs and blood” remember — or the somewhat progressive attitudes peppered throughout their takes on classic properties don’t really matter. The point is controversy was the name of the game, and so I’d be willing to bet they looked at the current climate at the time and picked something they thought was guaranteed to get people talking.
In that respect, I think it’s important to note the film was released not two years after the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which is “generally regarded as the origin of the contemporary glbtq rights movement”, and in which “transgender “street queens” played an instrumental role” (Stryker, S. 2015), and so it’s hard to believe that queerness — if not transness specifically — was not in some form in Hammer’s eye line while hunting for a way to modernize the story.
To be fair to them, it worked as well. This wasn’t Hammer’s first take on Stevenson’s novella — they had produced two others, a sci-fi comedy called The Ugly Duckling in 1959, and the more straight horror movie The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll in 1960 — but it is by far the most notable and the most well known. While the other two films tend to play the actual Jekyll/Hyde transformation as in line with Stevenson’s novella, Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde find a far more interesting and intriguing take. The simplicity of the gender-swap element as an addition to the narrative suddenly opens the film up to a much broader, much more fascinating interpretation. No longer is it merely an adaptation of a classic text, but rather — much like Hammer’s other, perhaps better-recognized forays into the world of classic monsters — becomes a unique and inventive take on a recognizable, iconic character in its own right.
The film itself was relatively positively received at the time of release, with Time Out calling the film “enormous fun” and an “admirably successful attempt to ring new changes on an old theme”, while Variety noted that “Director Roy Ward Baker has set a good pace, built tension nicely and played it straight so that all seems credible. He tops chills and gruesome murders with quite a lot of subtle fun. Bates and Beswick, strong, attractive personalities, bear a strange resemblance to each other making the transitions entirely believable”.
Anyway, whatever the intentions of the filmmakers and the studio, the fact remains that Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde can most definitely be read as a trans narrative. The film takes the core elements of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, but — in typically Hammer-esque fashion — changes many aspects of the plot to update it.
In Stevenson’s novella, the reputable Dr Henry Jekyll transforms into a murderous criminal named Edward Hyde after ingesting a mysterious chemical concoction in order to live out his darkest impulses. In the Hammer film, the ‘reputable’ Dr Henry Jekyll is an obsessive scientist trying to produce an elixir of life. His elixir requires female hormones to work and so, while initially purchasing fresh cadavers from Burke and Hare (yep! Burke and Hare are in this!), he begins killing women in a slew of murders attributed to Jack the Ripper (this movie is crazy!). However, the serum has the unexpected side-effect of changing Dr Jekyll’s sex, transforming him into the beautiful Martine Beswick.
As was noted by Trace Thurman in the excellent Horror Queers article, the gender-swapping aspect of the film calls to mind the current trend of “gender-swapping we’re seeing in major franchises today like Ghostbusters (2016), Ocean’s 8 (2018) and (possibly) future 007 films” (2020), and, much like Trace, I can’t help but wonder what the response to such a shake-up of the narrative would have been had the internet existed back in 1971.
Hammer’s decision to embed this aspect into its latest classic monster adaptation is a curious one, but it is also one that seems to be in keeping — at least in certain respects — with the spirit of the original novella. As already outlined, Hyde’s presence is not that of a second entity, separated from Jekyll by way of Bates/’Mother’, but is rather an extension of Jekyll himself. His darkest impulses made flesh, an outlet for the repressed, buttoned-up gentlemen of Jekyll to cast off the shackles of Victorian-era society and be free to enact his murderous, villainous desires. It falls heavily in line with the Victorian “beliefs of purity and deviance” which, as it is put in the essay Repressing Deviance: The Discourse of Sexuality in ‘The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ and ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’, by O. B. Mendlinger, they propelled “to new highs and even more extreme lows, especially within a single soul. After placing those “pure” parts on pedestals, they then tried to stamp out all that was “evil.” In doing so, the Victorians created a new duality within themselves, but that duality was out of balance” (2020).
Much has been made of the way writers, and especially horror writers, of the era utilized their chilling tales of the macabre and monstrous to explore infamous Victorian repression, and Stevenson’s novella is no different. This is a trend that passed over into film as well. Of course, Hammer is no stranger to Victorian sexual repression, and it is often explored, challenged, or outright blown to smithereens by their increasingly titillating and sexual output.
By the time we reach Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Hammer had entered into the realms of full-frontal nudity in their ever-growing quest for relevance and controversy — indeed, the studio struggled to fill the role of Hyde in the movie because it required nudity — and the sub-textual elements of the classic stories’ exploration of sexual repression had become full-blown text.
But this desire to ‘undress’ societal sexual repression, had grown beyond the realms of the period set Gothic horror of the likes Hammer was adept at and seeded its way into mainstream cinema. In his essay, Psychoanalysis of ‘Psycho’, Robin Wood comments on the very clear use of symbolism reminiscent of Victorian-era Gothic horror as being prevalent throughout Hitchcock’s film, and it is not alone. Peeping Tom (1960), would also explore the idea in a similar vein to Psycho, while Hammer was busy diving into it head-first with their Karnstein Trilogy, a trio of lesbian vampire films that I’ll come back to a little later.
What is interesting about Stevenson’s novella, though, is the way in which the exploration of sexual repression so easily translates to a queer reading of the text. Stevenson’s own sexuality has often been called into question — a series of letters between Stevenson and Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie seem to hint at a romantic attraction between the two men. According to The Guardian, the letters were written in 1892, and Stevenson died two years after, but there’s little denying the relationship was somewhat homoerotic, especially given Barrie himself wrote to Stevenson saying, “To be blunt I have discovered (have suspected it for some time) that I love you, and if you had been a woman…” (Ferguson, D. 2020).
Whatever Stevenson’s sexual preference, the original novella has regardless often been noted as containing “inherently queer undertones […] which alternately mediate, contain, and express the homosexual tendencies and desires of a queer coterie of professional men occupying the novel’s centre” (McIntyre, S. 2020), but by gender-swapping the character of Hyde, Hammer’s film shifts that reading entirely into the realms of a transgender narrative. It’s not hard to see where the trans reading comes from, really. But, what I think is truly interesting is the way in which the movie deals with the whole transformation.
Jekyll dubs his female self Edwina Hyde, and while initially he is curious but put off by this unexpected side-effect, he seemingly slowly begins to desire becoming Hyde, even going so far as to sort of excitedly purchase corsets for her. That Jekyll apparently appears to enjoy being a woman is key, but perhaps even more important is the fact that Hyde is presented throughout the movie as far more open, liberated, and free than the buttoned-up, repressed Jekyll. As Joe Lipsett writes in the aforementioned Horror Queers article on the film for Bloody Disgusting, “Although Hyde is hardly an agent for good, her spirit is adventurous, daring and boundary-pushing; here is a film that is only truly liberated and living deliciously when a woman seizes power from men” (2020).
It’s almost disarmingly positive in its depiction, especially for the time. While most horror movies featuring some kind of trans-coded character will lean into the psychological torment of gender confusion — often using it as a motive for monstrous and murderous behaviors (and yes, I’m throwing shade at De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) again) — Hammer instead presents it as a liberating and freeing experience for Jekyll… at least at first.
The movie has a lot of fun reveling in the wild freedom that Hyde brings to proceedings, and I’ll echo the Horror Queers’ sentiments here once again, and say that the biggest issue I have with the movie is that she’s simply not in it enough. It’s a shame because the middle section of the film — which sees Hyde embracing herself, making clothes out of drapes and buying herself extravagant dresses, and seducing Howard — is arguably the bit with the most potential. Clemens and Baker are smart enough not to play things too seriously as well, and so the entire film has a sort of lightness and silliness to it that really captures the excitement of Hyde ‘discovering’ herself.
As a trans narrative, it is this section that yields the most positive readings, too. Indeed, I have been through a similar phase of discovery myself, and so perhaps that’s why I warm to it so much. Hyde’s femme-fatale nature is also at its most playful and least insidious here. She toys with everyone, including Jekyll, and takes great pleasure in doing so. The juxtaposition between Jekyll and Hyde really adds to the more positive readings. Hyde’s refusal to submit to Jekyll’s buttoned-down, repressive lifestyle echoes the feelings of embracing one's true gender and exploring themselves as they are truly meant to be.
One could argue that Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a kind of allegory for the trans experience in general. Discovering one’s own dysphoria is difficult, and Jekyll struggles initially with the blatant enjoyment he gets from allowing Hyde to take control and to be the liberated, sexual, and open being he secretly wishes he were. Take Jekyll’s relationship with Susan, for example. Susan lives upstairs, and she desires Jekyll romantically. Jekyll, however, would rather throw himself into his work, and continuously misses or ignores her advances. He desires her too, which is made explicitly clear late in the film, but he is too repressed and too focused on his projects to engage her in a relationship. Counter this with Hyde, who seduces Howard almost immediately, taking exactly what she wants regardless of societal norms. It is through her that Jekyll can be unshackled and free to live a life of pleasure and enjoyment.
It’s important to note that this is what Jekyll wants, and he willingly transforms again and again before Hyde eventually develops the power to come out on her own. This too feels very apt for a trans reading. Transitioning is scary, and it begins with small steps. Initially one will make “strategic decisions regarding the enactment of gender and gender identity disclosure based on specific social contexts” (Brumbaugh-Johnson, S. and Hull, K. 2018) before fully embracing who they are and allowing that identity to ‘take over’.
There’s an argument to be made that Jekyll’s use of the serum to transform himself into Hyde is a stand-in for Hormone Replacement Therapy. After all, HRT involves ingesting the hormone that corresponds to one's true gender identity while blocking the hormone of the gender assigned at birth. A key plot point in the film is that Jekyll’s serum requires estrogen in order to work, hence his — and later Hyde’s — murderous late-night activities. Furthermore, the way Hyde slowly grows in strength the more Jekyll takes the serum parallels the way HRT slowly enables a person to better outwardly resemble and become the gender they identify as in the first place.
Admittedly, this analogy does also throw up some troubling implications. We can’t ignore the fact that Jekyll and Hyde are murdering women in order to obtain the estrogen required for the serum. In a sense, this is a variation on the themes seen again in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 Oscar-winning horror movie (it’s horror, m’kay? Get over it!), The Silence of the Lambs, in which Buffalo Bill kidnaps and murders young women in order to create a “flesh suit” that will — in their mind — enable him to become the woman he sees himself as. Like The Silence of the Lambs, the inclusion of this facet in Hammer’s Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde plays into that most insidious and harmful of cinematic trans stereotypes; the ‘trans as killer’ trope.
Jekyll’s motive for killing is intrinsically linked to his transness. While the reasons here aren’t as simplistic as something like Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) — where the killer kills merely because they are trans — it can still be read that way to a certain degree. Jekyll needs estrogen so he can transform, and so, in simplistic terms, he kills in order to become a woman. This problematic element of the film feeds deeply into the idea that trans folk are somehow stealing or hijacking femininity as a means to disguise themselves or use said femininity as a way to attack cis women. As Ruth Pearce writes in her introduction to TERF Wars: An Introduction, “trans women have long been positioned as a threat to cis women’s safety, especially in Western societies, because trans women’s bodies have been discursively associated with dangerous male sexuality and potential sexual predation” (2020).
The fact that Jekyll murders women specifically in order to obtain their estrogen positions trans folks’ very existence as ‘anti-woman’. Jekyll views his victims as little more than a means to an end for his own goals, and since that goal is a) to become a woman himself, and b) actively harming cis women, then it’s hard to deny that there are troublesome elements buried away inside Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde’s trans narrative. Moreover, the film emphasizes the traditionally masculine aspects of Jekyll’s characterization — he is heterosexual, for example, and as such is attracted to women. We see this both in terms of his relationship with Susan and in the sequence directly after the first transformation, in which Hyde stands in front of the mirror and excitedly plays with herself. This positions Jekyll as masculine within the narrative of the film, and while Hyde certainly displays traditionally feminine traits — she is attracted to men, she enjoys extravagant shopping sprees, and so on and so on — as outlined above, for the most part, the film clearly also depicts Hyde as an extension of Jekyll, not a separate entity in her own right.
With this in mind, we can draw the conclusion that the film presents both Jekyll and Hyde as predominantly male-coded characters, which means that despite their femininity and their transness, any acts displayed by them in the film — more importantly in terms of this line of thinking, their murderous tendencies — are coded entirely as male acts. Jekyll and Hyde are ‘a man preying on women’, which only further emboldens the kind of anti-trans rhetoric we hear so often from self-proclaimed ‘gender critical’ (lol at that!) so-called feminists.
It’s an odd element in a film that is unusually and oddly overwhelmingly positive in its trans depiction, but it’s one that cannot be ignored. The film almost seems to go out of its way to position Hyde — the feminine side of Jekyll’s own personality — as entirely threatening to women. Hyde shows absolutely zero romantic or sexual attraction to women, and yet she is a constant danger to them; when Susan discovers Hyde and her brother, Howard, in foreplay, Hyde quickly turns sinister, threatening Susan, and she murders women in the hunt for estrogen, and she ultimately plans to kill Susan in order to fully transform and become the dominating presence in Jekyll’s body.
Perhaps one of the most peculiar facets here is the decision to make Hyde straight. Given Hammer’s quest for controversy, you might be forgiven for thinking that including a lesbian element in the film might have helped in their hunt for relevance and success. Hyde’s killings can be coded sexual to a certain degree, but the actual physical sexual moments she has are all displays of eroticism with men. This certainly would have added to the reading, though Hyde’s sexuality most definitely raises questions about Jekyll’s. That Hammer chose not to go down this route, though, is made even weirder by the fact that a year earlier, in 1970, the studio produced the Gothic horror The Vampire Lovers, the first film in The Karnstein Trilogy; with the two follow-ups — Lust for a Vampire (1971) and Twins of Evil (1971) — coming out the same year is Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde. On reviewing The Vampire Lovers, The New York Times called it, “a departure from the hackneyed bloody norm… professionally directed, opulently staged and sexy to boot”.
These are of note specifically for two reasons. The first is that all three films are notable for their exploration of overt lesbian themes and the rather explicit — given the time — nature. The second is that The Vampire Lovers was directed by Roy Ward Baker, so the decision to shy away from the more obvious queer elements present in the narrative does strike me as a little odd.
Despite that, though, it’s impressive that a film of this kind could be quite so insightful when it comes to its trans representation. That it manages to maintain this reading fairly well is a testament to the genuine skill and talent of the filmmakers. It would have been easy for this to descend into typically exploitative and lazy depths, but the film doesn’t ever really lower itself to such cheap tactics. Instead, it plays with the ideas interestingly, and it is a legitimate shame that more isn’t made of these earlier moments. Watching Jekyll and Hyde discover themselves is a genuinely enjoyable time at the movies, and the way the film handles what is unquestionably a sensitive and complex topic is mostly admirable. Mostly…
Of course, for all its progressiveness and supposed positive representation of transgenderism, I’d be remiss not to mention the obvious negative aspects of the film when viewed through this lens. Hyde, for all her beauty and brilliance, is also a maniacal murderess. She is a textbook monstrous feminine. Sure, Jekyll killed, but when he does so it is out of (his perceived) necessity, and he does not take pleasure in it. Hyde, meanwhile, relishes murder and takes joy in toying with her victims. She even kills Jekyll’s friend, Professor Robertson, seducing him before plunging a knife into his back (more on that in a moment)! But, while this is all part and parcel of a femme fatale in a horror movie, we cannot ignore the fact that Hyde is Jekyll. These are not two separate entities inhabiting one body.
J. A. Symonds, a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, upon reading the novella wrote to Stevenson saying, “Most of us at some epoch in our lives have been upon the verge of developing a Mr Hyde” (McIntyre, S. 2020). In Stevenson’s original novella, the serum is used for purposes of living out Jekyll’s own darkest impulses. It stands to reason, then, that Hyde in the Hammer film is taking on a similar role, only now we have the gender-swapping aspect to contend with. Hyde consistently uses her allure as a female and societal expectation of femininity to evade capture and lull her victims into a false sense of security. She seduces Robertson, she escapes detection by simply being female when Jekyll is under surveillance, and at one point a future victim even drops their guard after finding out that the mysterious figure stalking her in the fog because, “Oh, it’s only a lady”.
That Jekyll purposefully uses the femininity of Hyde to dodge suspicion, and that Hyde likewise uses her own femininity to do the same, is troublesome within the context of a trans reading of the film. It feeds into the views and (largely unsubstantiated) claims of those pesky… ugh, ‘gender-critical’ feminists, who argue that things like allowing trans-women to use the lady's loo is “leading to a huge rise in crimes against [cis] females, including sexual assault and rape” (FPFW, 2018). Of course, these supposed risks are not evidenced, but this kind of rhetoric is representative of an ideological viewpoint that is born out of transphobic attitudes and a warped sense of fear which is, at best, spurred on by the problematic depictions of trans-coded characters in films such as Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde, and, at worst, actually created by them.
That both Jekyll and Hyde stab their victims — the many murdered women, hapless and lustful Professor Robertson — is a rather overt use of imagery. The penetration of the weapon suggests a certain level of sexual violence. As Carol J. Clover notes in her essay, Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film, “knives and needles, like teeth, beaks, fangs, and claws, are personal, extensions of the body that bring attacker and attacked into primitive, animalistic embrace” (1987). This only furthers the negative trans representation. Jekyll, as a male killer using his female alter-ego as a disguise to carry out these penetrative, horrific, and violent acts — especially those acts against cis women — encourages an outlook that sees trans women “positioned as imposters […] as perpetrators rather than victims of male violence” (Ahmed, S. 2016).
In a sense, the film is conflicted, straddling these two readings simultaneously and struggling to find which side of the fence it wants to sit. In the end it just sort of gives up, throwing out a lot of the established narrative and opting ultimately to actually separate Jekyll and Hyde into an obvious hero and villain respectively. Hyde decides that, in order to ensure Jekyll’s transformation into her is permanent, she must kill his love interest, Susan. Of course, Jekyll takes umbrage with this and so the stage is set for a climatic, and ultimately tragic, finale. But these negative readings shouldn’t detract from the surprisingly progressive and fairly positive aspects outlined earlier.
Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde is both outdated and incredibly ahead of its time. Perhaps this is why it failed to secure Hammer’s desired impact, and the studio was, eventually, left behind as a once-great icon overtaken by more gritty, ‘modern’ American horror. I have always been fascinated by their output though, and this film in particular perfectly encapsulates just why. As mentioned before, despite their “boobs and blood” approach, there was often a lot more going on within the films than it may initially appear. And that’s worth celebrating, I think.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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