Tales of the supernatural are trending – thanks, in part, to the runaway success of cult young adult fantasy fiction titles and our appetite for TV dramas merging gritty realism with magic and mystery. Delve into the recesses of literary history, however, and you’ll soon discover that Britain’s love of a supernatural tale stretches a lot further back than that.
Take ITV’s much-anticipated new drama, Jekyll and Hyde, for example. It’s based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s iconic novel, published in 1886, amidst a hotbed of Victorian-era supernatural fiction. It also happened to usher in the most successful fantasy genre of all: the superhero. Why? Because Robert Louis Stevenson’s story neatly nailed the concept of the duality of man and, from Batman to Fight Club, that idea has inspired countless new interpretations.
Since it was first published, Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has continued to capture the public imagination, spawning over a hundred film and theatrical adaptations while burrowing its way into the imagination of other writers, inspiring a slew of characters as wildly different as The Nutty Professor, and Norman Bates in Hitchcock’s Psycho.
Stevenson’s wife claimed that the novel was inspired by a nightmare from which she woke him, howling, one night only to be angrily told off for interrupting “a fine bogey tale”. The following morning, the writer feverishly set to work, and finished the manuscript in only three days but, according to his stepson, a chance remark by his wife led him toss this first draft on to the fire “the precious pages wrinkling and blackening and turning into flame” and immediately rewrite it - “sixty-four thousand words in six days”.
But the supernatural has fascinated people since the dawn of time, and a little mockery could not quench its power, its ability to play on primal terrors and our fear of the unknown. Horror and the macabre reached its zenith in the 19th century.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein infused it with fresh blood and a visceral horror in creating a monster that was a nightmarish vision of the clash between morality and modern science, Edgar Allan Poe distilled it into dark, unsettling poetic tales that plumbed the depths of the human heart, but Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde truly ushered it into the modern world, prefiguring the writings of Freud and proving that true horror did not come in the form of demons and werewolves, but from within. What shocked early readers was the realisation that the seemingly virtuous, upstanding Dr Henry Jekyll was a mirror image held up to Victorian society, and therefore to each of them.
The enduring legacy of Jekyll and Hyde extends far beyond its pages. It is the very ambiguity of the character that offers a canvas onto which we can project our deepest fears. Though vice is evil, Stevenson insists, it is also pleasurable. “With a transport of glee, I mauled the unresisting body, tasting delight from every blow,” Mr Hyde snarls over the body he has just killed - a comment so terrifying that it could have come from Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.
“Man is not truly one, but truly two.” Dr Jekyll’s harrowing discovery is simple, yet without it, there could be no American Psycho, no Fight Club, there would be no suave psychopaths like Hannibal Lecter, Tom Ripley and Dexter Morgan on the books of central casting, and the superhero – that most American of characters – might never have existed.
Charlie Higson rightly sees in Jekyll and Hyde “the prototype superhero story – it’s a guy with an alter ego. He can turn into someone else … do all the things he dreams about.” All superheroes embody the dual identity, but only some truly exploit the dark side. When creating Batman, Bill Finger and Bob Kane decided to avoid the brash colours and the utopian flavour of Superman in favour of creating something “black, terrible.” Kane enthusiastically credited a film version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as the source of some of his grotesque villains – the influence is most striking in Frank Miller’s radical “The Dark Knight Returns”, where Batman is a voice in the head of Bruce Wayne, one that will ultimately overwhelm him. A superhero’s alter ego can just as easily mask a thirst for anger and revenge as truth, justice and the American way.
In recognising that duality is the driving force of drama and the essence of what it means to be human, Stevenson devised a creation that continues to thrill, to haunt and to disturb because while unleashing the inner Mr Hyde makes it possible to live one’s wildest fantasies, it can also lead to carnage. As Spiderman’s uncle wisely said: “With great power comes great responsibility”.
