Theme: Split Personality

Split Personality, or to give it its technical name Multiple Personality Disorder and more recently Dissociative Identity Disorder, concerns individuals who have a condition where they periodically manifest one or more different personalities. This is a real world phenomenon and there have been a number of non-fiction works about people affected with such a condition.

Split Personality entered the Psycho-Thriller with Norman Bates and Psycho (1960) and there have been numerous other examples of split personality psychos. The Other (1972) created a unique twist where we had two twins, one good and one bad, before a twist ending reveals that one of them only exists in the other’s mind. Similar kinds of Conceptual Reversal Twists where characters are revealed to be inside someone’s head have been popular since.

The most famous fictional Split Personality was Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Dr Jekyll is an upstanding doctor who invents a potion that brings out his evil side that proceeds to rampage forth conducting wanton mayhem. This has been filmed multiple times – for which see Jekyll and Hyde Films. Another example would be the Batman villain Two-Face who is a physically divided personality with one side of his face scarred, one regular and his personality split between good and evil.