The doppelgänger or double has long been a part of the horror tradition (Check out this comprehensive survey by Aaron Sagers at Paranormal Pop Culture), but it’s garnering new interest with Jordan Peele’s Us hitting the theatres on March 22, 2019. Peele’s new “monsters” are “The Tethered,” and they are perfect doppelgängers of the central family of four, on vacation in Santa Cruz, California. So far, there’s not too much information about where these doubles come from or why, so it’s going to be interesting to see how much explanation Peele offers. As with most horror film monsters, less is usually more, so I’m hoping he’ll be restrained. Peele is on record as having said that he was inspired in part at least by the Twilight Zone episode “Mirror Image” (1960), which he watched as a child. But there’s another narrative from the mid 20th century in which a character confronts his exact double, one that is definitely worth watching: Basil Dearden’s The Man Who Haunted Himself, released in 1970 and based on Anthony Armstrong’s novel, The Strange Case of Mr. Pelham (1957), which was itself based on his short story, “The Case of Mr. Pelham,” published in Esquire on November 1, 1940. Armstrong’s story was also adapted in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode, “The Case of Mr. Pelham” (1955), directed by Hitchcock.
Check out the fabulous trailer for The Man Who Haunted Himself:
The Man Who Haunted Himself begins with Harold Pelham (Roger Moore, right before he became James Bond!) driving home to the suburbs after a mundane day at his London office. At some point on his ride home, though, Pelham’s sedate driving—and equally sedate black car—transform into utterly reckless driving in a flashy silver sports car. In this early scene, we see Pelham’s inner desires, released and disclosed to the audience.
Harold Pelham (Roger Moore) unleashing his double on the road
His bout of recklessness ends, unsurprisingly, in a near fatal accident. Indeed, Pelham dies on the operating table, only to be revived by the attending doctors. After his revival, for a brief moment, two heart beats appear on his monitor. As we learn later, it’s here that Pelham’s double is born.
The scientific evidence of the birth of the double on the heart monitor
In his essay from 1919, “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud argued that the idea of a double originally emerged from a fundamentally narcissistic self-preservative instinct: “The double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self” (142). This idea is literalized in Man, where the double is born to foreclose Pelham’s death. Indeed, toward the end of the film, Pelham’s double explains: “Don’t you yet see? I am you. You died on the operating table. That let me out.” Pelham’s double also explains what is often the case in narratives about the double: identity is a zero-sum game. Only one of the doubles can survive, generating much of the conflict in any story about doppelgängers. “So now there are two of us,” Pelham’s double tells Pelham. “It can’t go on, you know. One of us will have to go.”
One of the interesting aspects of Man is that Pelham does not actually see his double until near the end: he only hears about him from others. This is quite different from what seems to be going on in Peele’s Us—and what transpires in The Twilight Zone’s “Mirror Image”—both of which play on the horror of seeing your double—unanticipated, unpredicted, and utterly shocking.
Vera Miles as Millicent Barnes sees her double in the mirror in “Mirror Image”
That Pelham doesn’t see his double until the end allows the narrative to play for much longer in the realm of the psychological: perhaps Pelham is simply having memory lapses, blackouts—lingering after-effects of his head injury. He eventually goes to a psychiatrist (Freddie Jones) who tells him of the recognized “delusion of doubles” and affirms the possibility of a “brain malfunction” due to the accident. The doctor also delivers a fairly standard psychoanalytic explanation, telling Pelham that he is overly “puritanical” and has been fighting against his own “pleasure-loving side.” The psychiatrist tells him to “release this other side of your character,” urging Pelham to embrace his “other” personality and thus unite them. The film makes it clear that the double is not shaken off that easily, however. He doesn’t want to be unified with the stodgy and puritanical Pelham, preferring instead to remain unfettered by convention with his alter ego dead.
Pelham confronts his doppelganger near the end of the film
As well as offering a fairly standard psychoanalytic account of the emergence of the double—the bursting out of the repressed pleasure-seeking id—Man also intriguingly ties in automation, despite the film’s 1970 release date. It’s significant, for instance, that Pelham (both Pelhams, in fact) are involved in a complicated business deal centering on a new “marine automation system” that will supposedly “revolutionize” the process of monitoring and logging data. It will double efficiency and halve costs. Man thus taps into what has only become exponentially more threatening since 1970—the threat that automation poses to the self. In the 21st century, digital doubles proliferate –and stories of doppelgängers now often focus on the ways our many media doubles aspire to replace us. The 2018 film Cam, directed by Daniel Goldhaber, written by Isa Mazzei, and starring Madeline Brewer centers exactly this threat, which I discuss in a related post on Cam and the tradition of the double in horror. (And again, it’ll be interesting to see whether technology and social media play a role in Peele’s doppelgängers in Us.)
The lab where automation is being discovered
In the end, The Man Who Haunted Himself is perhaps a victim of too much explanation—the “death” on the operating table, the psychiatrist’s by-the-book Freudian analysis, the showdown between the doubles at the end—but that doesn’t stop it from being an interesting film, especially in its early exploration of what automation might mean for human selfhood.
Related: Dawn Keetley on the double in horror, including the recent Cam.
You can find The Man Who Haunted Himself on DVD, but the film was just released, on May 7, 2019, in a special edition Blu-ray:
