African American Caricatures in Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
October 23, 2019
By Emery Nash
The film scholar Robin Wood defined horror film as when “normality is threatened by the Monster.”[1] In early horror films, such as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), the monster often took the form of a literal monster. Sometimes these monster had racial characteristics.
In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, when Dr. Jekyll transforms to personify his worst qualities, director Rouben Mamoulian chose an ape-like caricature—Hyde was sexually deviant and violent—that drew from frequently repeated stereotypes of African Americans. This representation of Hyde drew critics’ attention: a writer in the New York Times wrote that “the face of the handsome young [man]…becomes…a sabre-toothed baboon with pig eyes.”[2]
This evidence, paired with a changing musical score–from the Baroque organ associated with Dr. Jekyll, to English music hall drinking songs paired with Hyde—signifies a “dichotomy between nobility and brutishness…Hyde is…a savage who cannot…adapt…[to] Victorian Society.”[3]
Together, these facts indicate racist undertones in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s musical and cinematic elements.
Emery Nash is a native of Nashville, TN and is a current senior at Davidson College. He is majoring in Biology and Music, and hopes to have a career in social justice, focusing on marginalized populations in American society.
[1] Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Andrew Britton, Richard Lippe, Tony Williams, and Robin Wood (Festival of Festivals, 1979), 14.
[2] Virginia Wright Wexman, “Horrors of the Body: Hollywood’s Discourse on Beauty and Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” In Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: After One Hundred Years, edited by William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch (University of Chicago Press, 1988), 284.
[3] Siegbert Salomon Prawer, “Book into Film I: Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” in Caligari’s Children: The Film as a Tale of Terror (University of California Press, 1981), 86-107.