Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976, aka The Watts Monster), directed by William Crain (who also directed 1972’s Blacula) is a brilliant example of the power of Blaxploitation horror. It features Dr. Henry Pride (Bernie Casey), a successful physician and medical researcher. The son of a maid, Pride has managed to work his way into the affluent white enclave around UCLA, but he travels to Watts to see patients at the free clinics populated by the neighborhood’s poor, Black residents. In a more psychological form of return, Pride’s research efforts are directed toward a cure for cirrhosis of the liver, the disease that killed his mother. Pride’s mother worked in a high-class (presumably white) brothel[i] and drank to dull the despair at spending her days “cleaning up the filth.” Desperate to find human subjects on which to test his cure, Pride injects himself with his own drug and turns into a violent white monster, one who returns to Watts not to cure but to kill.
Dr. Black is a fascinating film not least because it inverts the typical structuring dynamic of horror: a white normativity disrupted by black monstrosity. As Cynthia Erb puts it, “Dr. Black and Mr. White [sic] inverts the traditional dichotomy, so that black is the norm and white has extremely destructive connotations” (206).
Pride’s transformation to the monstrous and white Mr. Hyde
This norm is figured in Robert Louis Stevenson’s original 1886 novel, in which Mr. Hyde is repeatedly figured as “apelike” (20, 39, and 66). A defining moment in the novel, when Dr. Jekyll wakes up to realize he has involuntarily transformed into Hyde, contrasts his own “large, firm, white and comely” hand with the hand he encounters on waking: “of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair” (58). The novel thus explicitly racializes Jekyll’s transformation—from “white and comely” to “dusky”—while at the same time associating the “apelike” Hyde with blackness, an association that classic horror films would pursue in the 1930s.[ii] In Dr. Black, however, the figurative ape—the monster—is white.
The film’s representation of white monstrosity is especially interesting because Dr. Black begins with whiteness as a state of aspiration. The opening scene of the film shows Dr. Pride at his clinic in Watts with Linda Monte (Marie O’Henry), who works as a prostitute and is recovering from hepatitis. After Pride tries to discourage her from her line of work, she tells him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about: “You dress white. You think white. You probably even drive a white car” (which he does!) “And you know what?” she continues, if I was white, I just might have a chance.”
Dr. Pride’s fancy white car
Dr. Henry Pride does indeed become literally “white” after he takes his own experimental drug. Pride’s “becoming white,” however, is not the panacea Linda thought it might be. It is instead revealed to be a monstrous state.
As the white monster Mr. Hyde, Pride stalks the poor Black inhabitants of Watts in search of prostitutes and pimps to savage. Andrew Grunzke has claimed that Dr. Black is a divergence from the way in which “Hyde” typically expresses repressed desire. In Pride’s case, Hyde is “a dark implementation of retribution triggered by the doctor’s moral sense.” He “exacts revenge,” Grunzke continues, for the death of his mother (83-4). Obviously, this revenge is misplaced. The poor Black prostitutes and pimps Pride kills in his monstrous incarnation are certainly not the wealthy whites whose “filth” drove his mother to drink.
That Pride does drive into Watts to launch his killing sprees suggests his ambivalence toward the poverty out of which he has clearly managed to climb. As Robin Means Coleman writes, the monstrous Mr. Hyde makes “Watts his killing ground, where he unleashes his repressed hatred of prostitutes and pimps” (127). Writing of a similar dynamic in Cain’s Blacula, Annalee Newitz writes that “Solidly middle-class heroic, minority characters like Gordon [Thomas] are threatened by others who remain in an undeath of social and economic subjugation” (261). Perhaps Dr. Henry Pride, solidly middle-class, is indeed threatened by the Black underclass of Watts.
Dr. Pride’s divided self
But what makes Dr. Black a radical film is that Mr. Hyde is demonstrably white. Bernie Casey transforms into a monster with whiter skin, whiter hair, and blue eyes. He is a white man—a privileged, wealthy, educated white man who is destroying poor Blacks. On the one hand, Pride is almost certainly battling with his own internalized “whiteness” and, as Means Coleman puts it, “his repressed hatred” of Black prostitutes and pimps.[iii] On the other hand, his monstrous Mr. Hyde is illustrative of how wealthy, privileged whiteness destroys Black life. That the film holds both meanings—that it is a psychologically complex portrait of a successful Black man as well as an allegory about the damage caused by whiteness—only speaks to how great this film is.
Mr. Hyde climbs the Watts towers in the final scene
Everyone who has written about Dr. Black references the clear evocation of King Kong (1933) in the final scene in which Dr. Pride (as Hyde) climbs the Watts Towers and is shot down.[iv] In King Kong, of course, it is the dark primitive “other” who is destroyed in the film’s finale. Dr Black reverses the racial dynamic in that the monster who is so spectacularly cornered and killed is white—perhaps even suggestive of white supremacist practices that had ruthlessly impoverished Watts from the 1960s on.
I would argue that the final scene also invokes The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (Eugène Lourié, 1953). In this classic 1950s sci-fi horror film, scientists testing an atomic bomb in the Arctic unleash a Beast which proceeds to head home to Manhattan. The concluding scenes show the Beast rampaging through Coney Island and finally being destroyed by the forces of science and the military. As I have argued, this conclusion powerfully evokes race, with the dark Beast taken down by men who appear in white suits and hoods, evocative of the Klan.
In many ways, Beast is a more apt comparison to Mr. Black than King Kong. In both Beast and Mr. Black, as in Stevenson’s novel, it is science that unleashes the beast. In both films, science is both dangerous and associated with whiteness: the labs in Mr. Black form as much of a pervasively white mis-en-scène as the Arctic landscapes and all-white cast of Beast. And as Grunzke points out, Linda’s horror at Pride’s asking her to take his experimental drug evokes the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments (84) as well as scientific racism more generally.
The white mis-en-scène of Dr. Pride’s lab
In the narrative trajectory of Beast, though, all blame for science gone awry is displaced onto the victim of science—the dark creature who must be sacrificed at the end of the film. In Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, however, with its white sacrificial monster, the blame that belongs to the white scientific establishment is fully acknowledged.
In her essay, “The Gothic in and as Race Theory,” Maisha Wester points out that “Black authors throughout the African diaspora have particularly critiqued the reduction of blackness to monstrosity in the Gothic” (53). Her claim also applies to the creators of Black horror, including the oft-dismissed Blaxploitation film. In Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde, director William Crain and the Black leads of the film—notably Bernie Casey as Dr. Pride and Marie O’Henry as Linda Monte—create a film with an incredibly complex exploration of racial difference and monstrosity, one that explores a white monstrosity that destroys Black lives.
You can stream Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde on Amazon (ad):
Check out an article about lead actor Bernie Casey that ran in the Atlanta Daily World the day before Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde premiered in Atlanta on February 6, 1976.
Related: Blacula: Flawed but Important and Bloodlust and Blues Beyond Blacula: Ganja and Hess.
Notes
[i] See Means Coleman for evidence this was a white brothel (233).
[ii] For the racialization of Hyde, see Halberstam 13. For a brilliant discussion of race in classic horror’s “jungle-horror” films, see Berenstein 160-97; for the racialization of Frankenstein and King Kong, see Young, esp. 182-4. Young has an extensive discussion of the 1973 Blaxploitation film, Blackenstein (189-97).
[iii] Benshoff points out that the “good-black, bad-white dichotomy [of Mr. Black] is complicated because the film has already symbolically figured Dr. Pride as a ‘white’ Negro” (39).
[iv] See Erb, 207; Means Coleman, 128; Grunzke, 84-5.
Works Cited
Benshoff, Harry M. “Blaxploitation Horror Films: Generic Reappropriation or Reinscription?” Cinema Journal, vol. 39, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 31-50.
Berenstein, Rhona J. Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema. Columbia University Press, 1996.
Erb, Cynthia. Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture. Wayne State University Press, 2009.
Grunzke, Andrew L. Educational Institutions in Horror Film: A History of Mad Professors, Student Bodies, and Final Exams. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Halberstam, Jack. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Duke University Press, 1995.
Means Coleman, Robin R. Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present. Routledge, 2011.
Newitz, Annalee. “The Undead: A Haunted Whiteness.” In The Monster Theory Reader, edited by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 241-72.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales. Oxford World’s Classics, 2006.
Wester, Maisha. “The Gothic in and as Race Theory.” In The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles. Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 53-70.
Young, Elizabeth. Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor. New York University Press, 2008.
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