Plot: Dr. Henry Jekyll, an honest surgeon in Victorian England, is frustrated in his desire to marry his beloved, Muriel Carew, by her pompous father who insists that he has to wait eight months so that he can get married on the same date he married his wife. Jekyll, however, develops a formula that allows him to give free rein to the animal side of his nature. Taking the formula, Jekyll physically transforms into a bestial creature he calls Hyde. Hyde wanders the seedy parts of London where he takes an innocent showgirl/prostitute as his and holds her in mortal terror. However, Jekyll soon discovers that he is unable to control Hyde's appearances. This is one of more than 20 adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's short story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), making it the most adapted from the horror genre. (Not counting the various sequels featuring Dr. Jekyll's sons and daughters, X-rated versions, musical versions, parodies, and versions where Dr. Jekyll turns into a woman). In any case, this is the best of all the adaptations. It came out on New Year's Eve 1931, the same year that also brought us other classics like Boris Karloff Frankenstein (1931) and Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931). Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are like a triumvirate of horror stories. They are, as Stephen King argued, the templates for most other horror stories. And in turn all three of these films cast giant shadows over horror cinema in their formative treatment of their respective monsters, shadows that continue to influence the genre to this day. The story of Robert Louis Stevenson is a work of psychological guesswork that precedes what Freud would later hypothesize as the individual's struggle between responsibility for socialization (the superego) and humanity's baser drives (the id). . What makes this version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde more interesting is the addition of clearly sexual undercurrents. Dr. Jekyll is clearly frustrated in his love for Muriel by her father's absurd insistence on waiting eight months for their marriage. The character of a ballroom girl (who comes out in the film and says she is a prostitute) who Hyde confronts has now been added to the story. Throughout the film, the film maintains a bad girl/good girl polarity between the dancehall girl and Jekyll's girlfriend as a sort of sexual objectification of the double divide between Jekyll's two natures: one girl represents virtue, the other represents unbridled sexuality..