Seeing Double: Five of Fictions Most Terrifying Doppelgänger
This weekend I’m celebrating the release of Jordan Peele’s Us with a series of articles about the theme of the double. Read my review of Peele’s latest nightmare here.
Sometimes, in the light of day, during even our most lucid periods, we can feel like we’re seeing double. Its almost as though the world around us is a photocopy only the ink around the edges has grown faded with each new version. Its almost as though there’s another world around us near identical to our own but just different enough for its seems and edges to cause an involuntary double take as we pass them by. The double is an idea born out of the uncanny. When faced with a mirror of ourselves we are forced to question our reality. Horror fiction is littered with hundreds of doubles, mirroring some of societies worst and most insidious frailties. In honour of the song ‘I got 5 on it’ from Us, here are five of my favourite horror doppelgänger’s.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
There was a point early in Mary Shelley’s now 200-year-old masterpiece where I began to realise exactly what the creature represents. Victor, a man driven initially by a desire to help humanity, has lost the very humanity that sparked his quest to undo death. In doing so he has created his own mirror image. A double that resents its own creation. The Creature is, in many ways, a faded copy of Victor complete with his intellect. But he is an imperfect copy.
He is a double whose shell is formed of the component parts of others, sparked into life without consent. By virtue of its own creation, the Creature is angry and violent showing how even those that are the same in almost every way can grow differently as products of their own upbringing. Shelley’s use of the double brilliantly examines the identity of Victor and his creation calling into question the control we have over ourselves.
Cam (dir. Daniel Goldhaber)
On the face of it, Cam and Frankenstein share little in common beyond their horror roots but both feature doubles born of technology. In Shelley’s novel, Victors’ double is born out of electricity, a nascent technology that many at the time feared. In Cam Alices’ doppelgänger is born out of the internet, something we in the modern world are growing increasingly more afraid of with each passing news cycle. Alice sees her struggle to boost her ranking amongst other camgirls dashed by a mirror image of herself that begins broadcasting from her account. On the face of it, her double seems to be the perfect imitation of her online persona, Lola_Lola, but the cracks soon begin to form.
Like Frankenstein, Cam offers a protagonist similarly driven by an obsession that literally manifests itself in a double that haunts their every move. Cam is an extraordinary examination of the online doppelgänger we create for ourselves which distil only the parts of our identities we want the world to see. Victor may have created a literal monster but Cam asks us to consider the soulless digital creatures we create to haunt the passageways of the internet.
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
If the double is often used to show the inner evil of its counterpart, then no book more literally manifests its protagonist’s dark side more than The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The novella sees a young lawyer investigating a series of mysteries the surrounding his old friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll whose life had been plagued by the evil that exists within his own body. Jekyll attempts to control his double through the use of science by creating a serum that would suppress his evil persona but it’s a remedy that only goes so far. Jekyll and Hyde is one of the most seminal works within doppelgänger fiction and one that serves to interrogate the dark side within us all.
William Wilson by Edgar Allen Poe
In Poe’s short story, inspired by his time in London, we’re introduced to a protagonist who goes by the name William Wilson. The alliteration of his name is echoed in the double of himself he meets during his time at school. A man who shares a birthday, a name and, most uncannily, a strikingly similar appearance.
What follows leads Wilson to question his own sanity as his double further pushes his mind and reality to the brink. The mirror within which Wilson looks leads him to question the very nature of his own identity and builds a horror that exists, not in the outside world, but within the world of his own mind.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (dir. Philip Kaufman)
There’s a peculiar sense of claustrophobia that accompanies the end of the world in Philip Kaufman’s remake. There’s a distinct sense that as the population is slowly copied their emotions are the faded black ink lost in the transfer from one copy to another. The world around the protagonist — Donald Sutherland’s’ Matthew Bennell — is becoming smaller with each new copy as the freedom born out of individuality is lost and America is doubled into conformity.
Everyone around him is being copied into shells that physically resemble their counterparts but lack the soul within. The empty-eyed stares and uniform actions of the doubles threatens to break Bennell’s mind as the world around him grows less and less human. Its a slow and painful process where the double is used to represent America’s fear of Communism during the Cold War and one that is particularly pertinent in relation to Jordan Peele’s new film.
These are just a few of my favourite fictional doppelgänger’s and horror fiction is littered with hundreds more. Copies that exist to ask us, the audience, to question our own identity. The double offers us a glimpse inside ourself re-framing our relationship with the world around us. After all, we have all seen someone else out there in the world who looks just a little too much like ourselves for comfort.
Footnotes:
- Check out this amazing video essay about Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Ryan Hollinger over on YouTube.
