Twin, Fisherman, & Ghost

As a twin, I’ve always appreciated the suggestion in Brian De Palma’s 1972 Sisters (spoilers below) that—instead of there being a “good twin” and a “bad twin”—a set of twins might both, in fact, be bad. Or, at the very least, the “good twin” might depend on the badness of the other. This week, we begin with Margot Kidder's deranged Blanchion twins . . .

From the Grave.

Three ideas from horror cinema's past.

1. At the end of a romantic—if strange—evening, Danielle (Margot Kidder) and Philip (Lisle Wilson) find themselves kissing on the couch. We watch from above and zoom in as Philip moves his hand up her leg, pushing back her robe. The robe falls further open, the Bernard Herrmann score reaches an anxious climax, and the zoom finds itself centered on a large, unusual scar on Danielle’s side. It’s evidence of the medical/surgical secret at the heart of the movie, but it’s also a display, in a single shot, of the way in which the erotic in Sisters both mingles with horror and functions as a conduit to it. In one of many correspondences with Psycho, sex elicits the violent jealousy of another personality contained within a character's psyche (that of Danielle’s deceased conjoined twin Dominique). Just like in Psycho, we get an off-screen conversation between the two personalities. And just like in Psycho, we get acts of violence against the new object of romantic attention. Danielle naturally resembles Norman Bates, but she also resembles Irena from Cat People (1942)—the erotic acts as a trigger of transformation, calling something dangerous out that’s contained within her. As her ex describes the situation to Danielle, “Every time I made love to you, Dominique came back and took control of you.” Sex opens a dangerous door. It’s a powerful dynamic in horror, finding danger in the intimate, a testament to how the erotic can put transformative pressure on us and on the people around us—whether those are real people or the people in our heads.
2. Sisters is about a character with a shifting personality, but Danielle is not the only one who shifts. Emil (William Finley—the Phantom of the Paradise himself), Danielle’s ex, comes across in at least three different lights—performing a multi-angle rendering of male aggression and possessiveness. When we meet him, he’s following Danielle around New York City. Her date Phillip even has to perform a ruse (acting like he’s leaving her apartment when he’s really just parking around the block) to prompt Emil to leave. This is standard stalking, the disturbing behavior of a man who can’t or won't take a hint, who won’t leave his ex alone. We eventually learn, though, that Danielle is dangerous and unstable, that she does need supervision. Philip was not safe with her. At this point, Emil looks better. Still meddlesome and possessive though—trusting himself alone to handle her problems, even though she’s left him. But, at least, there's some justification to his behavior. We end up learning, however, much more about him. He’s not simply aware of Danielle’s issues, he’s the key author of them. His relationship with her—when she was a mental patient and he was her doctor—led to the tragic complications that have defined her life. By the time we’ve seen him commit someone sane under false pretenses, and then hypnotize and brainwash her, the picture of the deranged doctor is complete. Emil’s final form is the worst and contains the other two—a sort of nested doll of male malevolence. A controlling, meddlesome, inappropriate, sexually possessive man, with power—a monster especially because he can wield his standing and training to control the women who obsess or threaten him.
3. At the heart of Sisters there’s a mental institution. It’s distinct in that it’s a place where patients can freely come and go. Danielle, a former patient, an uncured one, has settled in New York City when we meet her. It’s also a place, though, that becomes a trap when journalist Grace tracks Danielle and Emil there. She’s intentionally mislabeled a patient and finds herself drugged and institutionalized. Mental hospitals and other carceral institutions can operate in horror in two contradictory ways. They can be sites that cannot contain their residents, places that a deranged murderer (e.g. Michael Myers) might escape from, or places to be trapped within, miserable prisons. In Sisters, the institution is both, wielding power through a selectively permeable boundary. It’s a depiction in keeping with the reality of incarceration—carceral spaces are not outside anything, they interact with the world around them. If in horror we worry both about being inside and about those inside escaping or being released, we're recognizing that our boundaries are not so neat or protective, that if the inside isn’t safe, then neither are we.

Right Behind You.

A thought on horror's present.

4. Horror can be a backward-looking genre. Sins of the past tend to haunt the present. In the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise, the past is in the title. The new entry in the series, I Know What You Did Last Summer (2025) (medium spoilers ahead) provides a partial taxonomy of functions for the past in horror. For our troubled young protagonists, the past is a site of trauma and secret sin. As ever in this franchise, they’ve covered up last summer’s crime, and they’re now being punished for it. The deeper past, the killing spree of the 1997 film, serves as a template—the killer donning the original slasher's slicker and wielding his hook. The past becomes our protagonists’ key to saving themselves: they need to investigate the people and circumstances surrounding last summer’s crime. They also need to look at the 1997 template as instruction for getting out alive. The past is lore too, as evidenced by the true crime podcaster in town visiting key '97 sites. The events of the original movie have cultural currency, are meaningful to fans. Viewers are, similarly, engaging with franchise lore and nostalgia, and the film recognizes this by bringing back Jennifer Love Hewitt, Freddie Prinze Jr., Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Brandy Norwood. In the world of the film, though, a lot has been done to cover up the events of 1997 (we hear that they're bad vibes for real estate investors). The erasure of the past—the failure to acknowledge or commemorate—proves a major driver of the new round of murders. In I Know What You Did Last Summer, the past does so much—does everything. This is a movie, and a franchise, obsessed with the past, and it provides a kind of catalog of what the past might mean, and what it might do, in horror.

Living Deliciously.

A recommendation.

5. There’s a special sort of pleasure in a movie that draws on themes and elements you love, but presents them in a frothier, sillier way than you're used to. Set on the rocky coast of Cornwall and drawing on the gothic, Lewis Allen’s ghost story The Uninvited (1944) recalls Rebecca but offers different tones from the moody, dark romance of Hitchcock/Du Maurier. Its charms include an entertaining cast (Ray Milland dating a too-young-for-him Gail Russell), a gorgeous coast and house, and elegant, wispy superimposed spirit effects. The Uninvited is not going to become your favorite movie, but if you came home after a night out, poured a glass of wine, and stumbled across it on TCM, it might be the perfect thing.

Dead of Night publishes every Tuesday. Reporting by The Washington Post today provided a detailed account of the experience of migrants sent without due process to CECOT in El Salvador. This fuller picture confirms and details what those of us paying attention already knew—that these people were subjected to repeated abuse and torture paid for by the U.S. government. The time to resist fascism is now.