Today in History—May 21: America's First Horror Movie Starred Jekyll and Hyde

The list

1. 01

   The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (novella) 1886

   Robert Louis Stevenson's story of a doctor who splits the good and evil sides of his personality with disastrous results

   Where to watch ▸
2. 02

   Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (stage play) 1887

   Hit play that inspired the 1908 film; its transformation so convincing an audience member accused the lead actor of being Jack the Ripper

   Where to watch ▸
3. 03

   Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (film) 1908

   Selig Polyscope Company production billed as the first horror movie in U.S. history; now a lost film

   Where to watch ▸
4. 04

   Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (film) 1931

   Version MGM tried to wipe out on purpose before putting out its own remake a decade later

   Where to watch ▸
5. 05

   Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (remake) 1941

   MGM's new adaptation, released after it attempted to destroy copies of the 1931 film

   Where to watch ▸
6. 06

   Additional Jekyll and Hyde film versions

   Six more film adaptations of the story appeared in the four years after the 1908 original

   Where to watch ▸

Facts from the original

• On May 21, 1908, Chicago audience members paid one dime to see what is considered the first horror movie in American history.
• The 1908 film adapts Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, about a doctor who separates the good and evil sides of his personality with disastrous results.
• Its advertising called the film 'thrilling,' 'marvelous,' 'mystifying,' and 'peculiar.'
• The film was produced by the Selig Polyscope Company and is classified as a lost film.
• A lost film survives only in incomplete forms such as clips, still images, ads, trailers, summaries, reviews, or bloopers.
• The Library of Congress lists 7,200 lost American films made between 1912 and 1929.
• Rather than taking directly from Stevenson's text, the 1908 film drew on a stage play of the same name that premiered in 1887.
• That 1887 play was a hit and allegedly staged the Jekyll-to-Hyde transformation so convincingly that an audience member accused the lead actor of being Jack the Ripper.
• Six more film versions of the Jekyll and Hyde story were released in the four years following the 1908 movie.
• A 1931 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde film was nearly lost on purpose when MGM tried to destroy all copies before releasing its own new version in 1941.
• Stevenson allegedly wrote his first draft in three days.
• Other events on May 21: in 1881 Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross; in 1901 Connecticut passed the first motor speed limit laws (12 mph in town); in 1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic.
• Notable May 21 birthdays include Alexander Pope (1688), Fats Waller (1904), Mary Robinson (1944), and Loretta Lynch (1959).
• On December 18, 1912, paleontologist Arthur Smith Woodward of the British Museum announced bones he believed belonged to a previously unknown extinct hominin, Eoanthropus dawsoni, presented as the missing link between apes and humans.
• The Piltdown fossils, pieces of a cranium and jawbone, reached Woodward through English lawyer and amateur fossil hunter Charles Dawson, who said they came from a gravel pit at Piltdown Common in southeastern England.
• While some doubted the claim, national pride and racial and cultural prejudice led many Europeans to want humanity to have evolved on the British Isles despite growing evidence for Africa.
• Later digs at Piltdown produced artifacts that seemed to confirm the find, but the jaw did not fit together properly and no other ancient human fossil combined such a large brain case with a thick jaw.
• Piltdown man's bones had been colored with chromium and iron salts to look aged.
• By 1930 Piltdown man was a glaring anomaly in the fossil record, and it took until 1953—using carbon, fluorine, and radioactive dating—to expose the bones as a forgery combining a human skull with orangutan and chimpanzee jaw fragments, treated to seem about half a million years old.
• Dawson, who died in 1916, remains the likely perpetrator, though more than a dozen other suspects have been proposed, some as recently as the 1970s after similarly treated bones were found among a disgruntled British Museum volunteer's belongings.
• Other events on December 18: in 1271 Kublai Khan established the Yuan dynasty; in 1865 slavery was abolished in the U.S. via the Thirteenth Amendment; in 1966 Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas premiered on CBS.
• Notable December 18 birthdays include Fletcher Henderson (1897), Keith Richards (1943), Steven Spielberg (1946), and Billie Eilish (2001).