They become allegorical representations of either moral or religious struggles. More often, identical twins present subjective dichotomies for readers or viewers. The Grady sisters are ghosts, but in other texts twins can also be telepathic. Twins’ inherent uncanniness is often supplemented with additional supernatural powers.

Although the sisters were not identical twins in Stephen King’s source novel, Lisa and Louise Burns’s audition made director Stanley Kubrick change his mind – identical twins were just spookier.Īccidental though this choice may have been, it plays with the idea of twins being reflections of one another – and at least one film critic has postulated that the careful alignment of the Grady sisters is an indication they may actually be the same person. The most memorable example of the visual use of identical twins in horror is that of the Grady sisters in The Shining (1980). This is the case with identical twins, who tend to populate film more than literary fiction, given the reliance on images in film.

The “unheimlich”, or uncanny, involves the experience of something familiar being rendered unfamiliar or of something new being experienced as strangely familiar. Listen here, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from.

Xavier Aldana Reyes features in the June episode of The Anthill podcast, on twins. The scariest thing about evil twins is, after all, that they embody repetition, and “repetition of the same thing” is one of the elements psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud identified as being connected to the effects of the “uncanny” in his influential 1919 essay of the same name. It is not a coincidence that evil twins in horror and the Gothic tend to be identical (with the odd exception, like 1970’s Goodbye Gemini). Their extreme similarity, the fact they are virtually indistinguishable and purportedly have deep connections are the kinds of elements that get repeatedly exploited for dramatic purposes. There’s something about twins that gives them great horrific potential. They have an even longer history that goes back to, at least, The Comedy of Errors. Twins and doubles have been making unsettling appearances in Gothic novels and horror films for decades.

Actresses who played those spooky twins