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Horrific History
On May 21, 1908, the first American horror movie premiered in theaters. The culprit was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an adaptation of the similarly named Robert Louis Stevenson novella. Ads described the film as “thrilling,” “marvelous,” “mystifying,” and “peculiar.” Was it? We’ll never know. The 1908 film reel was lost to time, and no one alive today has seen this piece of horror history.
Robert Louis Stevenson published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886. At the time it was viewed as a “penny dreadful”—an often gory, violent, or otherwise shocking story sold for cheap. The book was an immediate success, selling about 40,000 copies in its first six months.
All the world’s a stageThe 1908 film diverged heavily in plot from Stevenson’s original book. Instead, it modeled itself after an 1887 theatrical adaptation that had already made major changes to the story. The play allegedly depicted the transformation from good Jekyll to evil Hyde so convincingly that an audience member accused the lead actor of being Jack the Ripper—which sounds like a great idea for a horror movie.
Lost mediaThe Library of Congress lists 7,200 lost films created between 1912 and 1929 in the U.S. alone. Another Jekyll and Hyde film also nearly made the list. When MGM began production on a 1941 version of the story, it bought the rights to a 1931 release—and shelved it for decades.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
