The Second Night of Halloween 2022

ON THE SECOND NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Brian De Palma’s 1972 psychosexual classic, Sisters (aka Blood Sisters). Margo Kidder plays Danielle Breton, a Québécois model and TV commercial actress who has just moved to New York. Danielle meets a man on a weird Candid-Camera-esque show called Peeping Toms. On the show, she pretends to be a blind woman who mistakenly enters a men’s locker room and starts undressing. Through a hidden camera, we see a hapless man in the locker room decide to silently watch her undress rather than alert her to her mistake. Despite his choice, Danielle asks the man out to dinner and drinks after the show. Soon they wind up back at her apartment and hook up. In the morning, the man hears Danielle arguing with a strange woman in another room. When questioned, Danielle informs the man that the other woman is her psychotic twin sister, Dominique. We learn the two were born conjoined but surgically separated as adults. Later, when the man brings a cake to the sister whom he thinks is Danielle, she grabs a knife and stabs him to death. This is actually Dominique, who has been thrown into a murderous rage by her sister’s sexual exploits. 

Well, sort of.

Once again, all is not as it seems with these twins. Also once again, it’s quite obvious what the twist is: the murderous twin has actually died some time ago. The surviving twin’s psyche has fractured, such that she now switches between the two identities so as to maintain the delusion that her sister is still alive. This is revealed over the course of a dogged investigation by a Lois Lane-esque reporter (as a bit of retroactive irony, given that Kidder herself would go on to play the definitive Lois Lane six years later) who happens to witness the murder through her rear window.

Sisters was De Palma’s first in his signature series of shock-thrillers that serve as both Hitchcock pastiches and American riffs on the Italian giallo. With this highly entertaining entry, De Palma already manages to masterfully execute familiar Hitchcock tropes—including lingering emphasis on objects that then become major clues, investigators sitting right on top of a body’s hiding place, and clever parallel sequences seen from both sides of the action—while injecting much more lurid sights than Hitchcock was ever allowed to get away with under the Hays code—including full frontal nudity and a gory shot of the paramour’s mouth and cheek hanging ripped open. Sisters’ propulsive pace is fueled by a wonderfully wrenching score by Bernard Herman that recalls his own music for Psycho and Vertigo. Meanwhile, Kidder as usual is incredibly charming, despite her rather cartoonish French accent throughout. 

As far as our TWISTED TWINS & DUPLICITOUS DOPPELGÄNGERS theme: it’s interesting that in the same year, the same treatment of twins would play out through the same twist in two major horror movies, The Other and Sisters. In both, it’s revealed the psychotic identical twin sibling has died before the opening, while the supposedly normal and “good” twin commits bloody deeds in order to sustain the belief that the pair remains unseparated. One difference is that while The Other indulges in mysticism so as to allow for the interpretation that the absent twin is a ghost, Sisters introduces the medical horror of an operation to separate conjoined twins so as to lead us to speculate on the mysterious connection between biology and psychology. In carving Danielle and Dominique apart, thus causing Dominique’s death, a substantial piece of Danielle’s mind was also lopped off, it seems.