The Fourteenth Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE FOURTEENTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Dead Ringer (1964), directed by Paul Henreid. 

Bette Davis plays a dual role as identical twin sisters Edith and Margaret. Margaret is lavishly wealthy as a result of marrying a man whom Edith was in love with, twenty years prior. Meanwhile, Edith is three months behind on rent for the dive bar she runs. When Margaret’s husband dies, the two meet again at his funeral. Edith grows jealous of Margaret’s extravagant life and becomes furious when she learns Margaret forced the man to marry her under false pretenses. Thus, Edith murders her sister, swaps clothes with her, and poses her body to make it look like it was Edith who committed suicide in her apartment. Edith then assumes Margaret’s identity and takes up residence in her mansion. Unfortunately, she fails to think through the details well enough to go undetected by Margaret’s staff. However, the sad thing is that it doesn’t matter, both because the staff hated Margaret and prefer Edith and because no one misses Edith enough to look into the incongruities of her supposed suicide. Things only go off the rails when a lothario whom Margaret was having an affair with appears and reveals that he and Margaret poisoned her husband. Ironically, Edith winds up sentenced to death for a murder committed by her sister. 

Dead Ringer is a tightly plotted picture full of gothic motifs and sly duplicity. Bette Davis adeptly distinguishes Edith from Margaret by maintaining a harshness to her face and a heaviness to her movements, evidencing the weight of her poverty, that Margaret lacks. The best scene is when Edith prepares to take her sister’s place after killing her. It’s chilling as we watch her undress her own sister’s corpse, one article of clothing at a time.

For our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme, I want to briefly discuss this film’s twin, David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers (1988). Cronenberg clearly intended to echo Dead Ringer with both his film’s title and many of its plot details. Jeremy Irons stars as both of its twins, confident Eliot and nervous Beverly. The two pose as one another not for financial gain but to experience one another’s sexual partners. Then, due to a drug-induced psychosis, the twins permanently switch personalities. A gory fiasco ensues. So, the plots of both films are driven by one twin’s jealousy over what the other has and the mechanics by which they switch places and come to learn the “be careful what you wish for” lesson. There is a kind of dynamic of identity that both films subscribe to, where for two people with the same biology, pivotal decisions lead to divergent lives, which in turn produce divergent personalities-- but one can become internally similar to the other again by living as her. That is, according to twins horror mythos, since twins are identical in nature, only nurture can produce a difference in them. But nurture is subject to change, depending on life circumstances that are chosen or imposed, so no difference between twins is final. The idea that twins horror communicates, then, is that we are all ourselves capable of whatever evil might be perpetrated by our doppelgängers.