ABSTRACT
From a vantage point in the twenty-first century it may be difficult to imagine a horror film soundtrack without the dissonances and narrative telegraphing that have been a characteristic part of the horror genre for several decades; yet an archeology of the soundtracks of early horror films has only recently begun, even though the rise of this particular genre seems to have been intimately tied to the drastic advances connected to sound reproduction technologies (as well as having been a genre that was and is simultaneously profitable and disreputable). Robert Spadoni argues convincingly of the link between the coming of sound film and the rise of horror as a genre in 1931, positing that the strangeness of the synchronized soundtrack would resonate especially well in Dracula (Browning, 1931) and Frankenstein (Whale, 1931), two films whose transgressive stories complicated notions of life and death just as the technical advances of the new sound cinema confused reality and artifice for its shocked audiences.2 Spadoni’s understandable emphasis on Dracula and Frankenstein-Universal Pictures’ important building blocks of the horror cycle that Spadoni has ending in 19363-overlooks (and underhears?) Rouben Mamoulian’s remarkable version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released in the US only five-and-a-half weeks after Frankenstein, at the end of 1931. The occasionally epistolary nature of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which gradually reveals (in the manner of a mystery) the connection between Jekyll and Hyde, provides another reason to link Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde together with Frankenstein and Dracula, two works that also unfold their stories in part through letters written by characters in the novels. Numerous stage versions (most famously those starring Richard Mansfield) preceded the early films based on Stevenson’s novella, with the 1920 rendition featuring John Barrymore generally regarded as the most distinguished cinematic version before Paramount Pictures returned to the story in 1931.4 With Mamoulian’s version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, sound design and music took on an enhanced role in the film’s creation of dread and revulsion for the audience, as the soundtrack
worked together with the point-of-view shots to form a groundbreaking sense of embodied subjectivity; elements of sound and music help to put the audience eye to eye (and ear to heart, as will become clear) with their own mortality.5
