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In the 1977 novel The Shining, the book by American writer Stephen King that director Stanley Kubrick turned into the famous 1980 film, the former hotelier’s daughters are not twins, but eight- and ten-year-old sisters. After a decade-long audition of twin London girls, Lisa and Louise Burns, Kubrick changed that detail of King’s story. “Stanley decided twins were definitely scarier,” the Burns sisters said later in 2015.
The physical resemblance of identical twins — twins born from a single egg that was fertilized by a sperm and therefore share 100 percent of their genes — has held a deep fascination in popular culture and has been a subject of scholarly interest for centuries. Part of the fascination is that the phenomenon is a relative exception: According to a 2021 estimate quoted in the journal Human Reproduction, only 4 in 1000 births worldwide are identical twins.
However, much of the attraction of physically indistinguishable or almost indistinguishable twins stems primarily from the very long history of literary texts, genre stories and stereotypes with which these people have been associated for centuries: starting with the misunderstandings in which they are protagonists many comedies Greek and Latin. Aside from dramatic purposes, the twins’ traits are more recently being used to evoke special feelings in gothic novel and horror cinema, as Xavier Aldana Reyes, a scholar of English literature and cinema in Manchester, writes at the website The Conversation Metropolitan University and Co-Director of the Manchester Center for Gothic Studies.
Clichés such as that of the “evil” twin are the basis of numerous historical legends and novels, including The Vicomte de Bragelonne, written in 1848 by Frenchman Alexandre Dumas and based on the hypothesis that Louis XIV of France had a twin brother, kept hidden in order to avoid disputes over the right to the throne.
According to Reyes, the most fascinating yet disturbing aspect of identical twins is the fact that they are the embodiment of the repetition of the same element.
Sisters Lisa and Louise Burns, who play twins from the 1980 film ‘The Shining,’ at Fan Expo Canada in Toronto August 29, 2014. (Christopher Drost/SHIFT digital/ZUMA Wire)
This concept was particularly popularized by a well-known 1919 essay by the Austrian neurologist and founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud on what would later become one of the most important aesthetic categories of the 20th century: the uncanny. Freud defined the feeling one feels when something very familiar is perceived as the opposite of oneself as uncanny: something that disturbs us, familiar, but at the same time not familiar at all because it is repressed, “that kind of fright, that goes back to what has long been known”.
Eerie effects can arise from many different situations, and typically ones in which the same fact, gesture, or phenomenon is repeated identically (which is one of the reasons why even mirrors are considered eerie objects in many ways). And the origin of feeling is the discovery that something supposedly unique actually has a counterpart in something else. The case of identical twins or doppelgangers, for example, is, according to Freud, a typical disturbing experience in that it is a “representation of the doppelganger”. And it proposes paradoxical and indeed disturbing hypotheses such as the “identification of a subject with another person” or the idea that a kind of telepathy might exist between two people, an “immediate transmission of psychic processes from one to the other”.
Freud’s reflections on the uncanny were fundamental to the modern understanding of the unconscious and, along with others, served to validate the idea that people under the influence of other forces may not have full control over their actions and thoughts. But as early as the 19th century, the “double” was a recurring theme in the Gothic novel, through the myth of the double.
In this literary genre, which includes novels such as The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde belong to Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, a person’s “double” often tended to be an evil copy, sometimes ghostly, sometimes real. And he roamed the streets living a parallel existence, usually embodying qualities opposite to the other person’s. When the social norm calls for being polite, good, and conscientious, Reyes told the Atlas Obscura website, “then the selfish, violent, and unsuppressed side is doubled down.”
(Bart and his evil twin in an episode of The Simpsons)
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According to American literary scholar Karen Dillon, a professor at Blackburn College in Illinois and author of The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture, between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, identical twins became part of the collective imagination in new ways. In some scientific studies, they were used as ideal test subjects because they made it possible to assess the effects of certain treatments with the same genetic characteristics: a possibility that was also famously exploited in the eugenics experiments of the Nazi regime.
This type of experimentation, according to Dillon, over time helped establish an effect of “dehumanizing” the twins. In many contexts, they were viewed less as humans and more as subjects of scientific study and morbid curiosity, if not freaks, particularly in the particular case of the Siamese twins.
During the 20th century, identical twins also became a recurring theme in horror cinema, which inherited in part from Gothic literature and with linked them to twins: usually to describe different sides of the same person.
A scene from the 1992 horror comedy Army of Darkness
In particular, the theme of the “evil” twin in horror cinema, according to Dillon, made it possible to describe evil as a phenomenon that goes beyond any understanding or explanation. Even under the same environmental conditions, and therefore for no apparent reason, twins could actually grow up showing one trait of evil and the other trait of good. And both for practical reasons and to emphasize the extreme physical resemblance thanks to technology, it was often the same actor who played the two different roles: Margot Kidder in Brian De Palma’s film Sisters (1973), for example, and Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers (1988) by David Cronenberg.
In other cases, such as in the acclaimed 2019 horror film Us, directed by American Jordan Peele, the subject of the double is instead used with other dramatic purposes: to describe radically different environmental conditions experienced by seemingly indistinguishable people. More recently, the impressive effect of identical twins has also been revived in fashion: Last September’s Gucci show with identically dressed couples of identically dressed models caused a lot of conversation.
– Also read: How twins are created in the cinema
Trivially, according to Dillon, who also has a twin, the main reason the perception of identical twins has remained essentially unchanged throughout the 20th century is the exceptional nature of the phenomenon: the fact that it’s not that common a case has prevented it other stories replaced these literary stereotypes. Twin studies continue to be a staple of scientific research: one of the best known, and most recent, was conducted by NASA in 2019 on the Kelly twins — Scott, an astronaut, and Mark, a former retired astronaut and current Arizona Senator — to evaluate how long stays in space affect astronauts.
Astronaut Scott Kelly, left, and his twin brother Mark, former astronaut and current U.S. Senator from Arizona, in Houston on March 4, 2016 (AP Photo/Pat Sullivan)
Finally, there are global gatherings of identical twins, like the Twins Days festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, where you can see dozens of identically dressed identical twins competing for various prizes. And for years, in addition to university researchers and companies interested in including twins in their studies, this type of gathering has also attracted many people who experience their twins as “a distinctive trait of their identity,” according to Dillon. Which “reinforces all elements of the freak show” and thus contributes to the survival of many clichés.
“I’d be rich if I got a dime every time someone asked me, ‘Do teachers ever fall for you changing classes? Can you read each other’s minds? Do you have a secret language?” Dillon said, describing the experience of growing up with an identical twin as “a unique social context.” And he added that stereotypes, funny as they may seem, can also have significant psychological implications and that it would be better to treat twins as individuals because they are: They are “two individuals who simply shared the womb.” . .