Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
A London doctor finds a way to be wicked without consequences, and the bill arrives anyway.
The first great American horror performance, and most of it is done with a face. For Jekyll’s first change Barrymore simply contorts himself, hands clawing and shoulders collapsing, and the camera keeps running on the shot. Make-up and the elongated skull come later, once you have already believed him. Robertson sets the story among dinner-party moralists who preach temptation over the port, so Hyde reads less as a monster than as the party’s logical guest. Watch for the spider: a phantom the size of a man crawls onto Jekyll’s bed, and it is still one of the oddest images of the silent screen.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- John S. Robertson
- Photographed by
- Roy Overbaugh
- With
- Edgard Varèse · John Barrymore · Nita Naldi · May Robson · Louis Wolheim · Charles Lane
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Two ways to make a monster with a face. Barrymore shows the change happening in front of us before the make-up arrives; Chaney hides his work under a mask until the moment it is torn off. One horror is becoming, the other is being seen.