Hyde in this film looks rather hairy and toothy, but the main thing that makes him appalling is that he goes to cheap saloons and watches burlesque acts and becomes obsessed with a working girl, Ivy. The struggle between Jekyll and Hyde in this film is between two men of different classes.
Once I saw this, I began to see other kinds of monsters spawned by capitalism: slave-class cyborgs like RoboCop; ghosts of the ghetto like Bones; human batteries in the Matrix. Monster stories work because they express the dark side of ourselves and our cultures.
Capitalism is a powerful social force that divides us, destroys lives (think market crash), and pushes us to do unpleasant things against our will (like work awful jobs) in order to survive. It's not surprising that it inspires horror movies.
Certainly there are monsters that don't represent our fears about capitalism. I just saw The Descent, which was a decent little monster movie about human/mole Lovecraftian creatures who eat a bunch of spelunkers.
If I had to say what kinds of real-life fears were being worked out in that movie, they would have to do with gender and sexuality (two common issues that haunt monster flicks) — all the spelunkers are female, and the main conflict is that one woman had an affair with the other's husband the day he died. There's a lot of squeezing into wet holes and women fighting each other in pools of chunky blood, as well as battling these ghostly pseudo-men. Not much about capitalism at all.
In your Wikipedia biography, it mentions you wrote your dissertation on "images of monsters, psychopaths, and capitalism." What makes a techno-geek such as yourself interested in such things?
Films in the imaginative genres like horror, science fiction and fantasy are essentially the cultural sphere of techno-geek life. I think the spirit of invention that pushes somebody to build a cool new hardware device or discover a new genetic mechanism is the same thing that fuels narrative invention.
One could argue that horror and science fiction are the uneasy conscience of real science. They're a place for exploring the possible consequences of what we want for ourselves in real life. In horror film, we can speculate about what it would be like to build sentient robots, while in many labs around the world people are actually trying to do it. There's a reciprocal relationship between those two activities, and I want to pay attention to both of them.
Article comments
1 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!