Scalpel Summer Presents: Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1959)

This summer, the International Museum of Surgical Science and Stephanie Sack present SCALPEL SUMMER, a three-film screening series exploring surgery, science, and bodily transformation through some of cinema’s most delirious visions of 20th century medical obsession. Tickets: $15 GA Presale: Admission to either 7/23 or 8/20 screening $10 Student Presale (Use code STUDENT at checkout) $10 IMSS Member Presale (Use code IMSSMEMBER at checkout) At Door $20 at Door $15 Student at Door $15 IMSS Member at Door Screenings David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers - SOLD OUT Thursday, June 25, 2026 Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, 1959, UK Thursday, July 23, 2026 7:00–9:00 p.m. Doors at 6:30 p.m. The Unknown Man of Shandigor, 1967, Switzerland Thursday, August 20, 2026 7:00–9:00 p.m. Doors at 6:30 p.m. Hammer Horror Swings in for SCALPEL SUMMER with a one-night-only screening of 1959’s Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde After launching June 25 with a sold-out screening of David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers, SCALPEL SUMMER returns to the International Museum of Surgical Science on Thursday, July 23 with one of Hammer Horror's boldest and most delirious creations: Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1959). Released during Hammer's adventurous late period, the film stars Hammer leading man Ralph Bates and genre favorite Martine Beswick in a Technicolor collision of Gothic horror, Victorian melodrama, medical experimentation, and gleefully transgressive storytelling. More than fifty years ago, Chicago audiences first encountered Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde during its original downtown engagement at the legendary Woods Theatre at Randolph and Dearborn -- less than three miles south of the International Museum of Surgical Science! At 7p, on July 23, this audacious Hammer classic makes a wickedly appropriate return to the city, trading a grand Loop movie palace for a Gilded Age mansion devoted to the history of medicine. Set in Victorian London against the backdrop of the Whitechapel Murders, with the infamous Burke and Hare murders woven into its delightfully macabre plot, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde transforms Robert Louis Stevenson's classic tale into one of Hammer's most inventive reimaginings. In pursuit of the secret to eternal youth, Dr. Henry Jekyll's increasingly reckless experiments with hormones, cadavers, and human anatomy unleashes Mrs. Hyde, a seductive female alter ego whose ambitions and impulses prove even deadlier than his own. Far more than a traditional horror film, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a stylish, witty, and surprisingly sophisticated meditation on identity, desire, repression, and transformation. More than five decades after its release, its prescient dismantling of rigid gender expectations feels remarkably contemporary while never sacrificing the sumptuous Gothic atmosphere, outrageous set pieces, and voluptuous excess that made Hammer Horror an international sensation. Presented inside the International Museum of Surgical Science's magnificent Hall of Immortals, the screening places Hammer's fever dream of medical transgression in direct conversation with one of Chicago's most extraordinary cultural spaces -- a museum where centuries of surgical history provides the perfect setting for one of cinema's most memorable stories about science run gorily, gloriously amok. Following the screening, guest speaker Matt Kasin brings his gloriously outsized sensibility to the evening's post-film Q&A. As Gaudy God, Matt blends cinema, fashion, music, and performance into one fabulously gaudy package. A longtime Music Box fixture, DJ, filmmaker, and vintage curator, he has a particular gift for finding the camp, subversion, and sheer style hiding in plain sight. With Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde gleefully scrambling gender, Gothic horror, and Hammer excess, there could be no better accomplice for the evening's conversation. So swing by and scrub in! As long as you keep your hands inside the operating theater, the prognosis for SCALPEL SUMMER is excellent.