Hook: Among today’s news feeds, it was the "Random Movie of the Day" that caught my eye—Sisters (1973), Brian De Palma. The description mentioned: "conjoined twins separated after surgery, one normal, the other aggressive." I thought it was just another Hitchcock knockoff—and nearly scrolled past. But then I stumbled upon a line in Wikipedia that stopped me in my tracks: "De Palma was inspired to write the screenplay for Sisters after reading an article in Life magazine in 1966 about the lives of the Soviet conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova." I dug into their biography—and it turned out to be so horrifying that any horror movie pales in comparison to a children’s matinee. Masha and Dasha were born on January 3, 1950, in Moscow, fused at the pelvis at a 180-degree angle, with three legs, four arms, two heads. They were taken from their mother at birth. Their mother was told the children had died of pneumonia. In reality, Academician Anokhin whisked them away to the Institute of Experimental Medicine and used them as lab rabbits for six years straight: freezing one in ice to near-death temperatures while observing the other’s reactions; starving them; depriving them of sleep; administering electric shocks in time with a metronome. This is officially classified as a "prolonged case of medical torture" (Wikipedia, source—Daily Mirror, 2017). And in 1973, Brian De Palma made a film based on a photograph from Life magazine—without knowing the full backstory—one of the most elegant thrillers of the decade, which invented split-screen as a language of its own. And this chain—from a Soviet lab table to the visual DNA of Burton, Lynch, and Fincher—seemed so insane to me that I couldn’t walk away.
When I first read about Masha and Dasha, I thought Wikipedia was dramatizing. I double-checked: Daily Mirror, BBC Horizon (1999), Juliet Butler’s novel The Less You Know, The Sounder You Sleep (2017), RBTH (2021)—all sources confirm the same thing.
They were born on January 3, 1950, in Moscow. Their mother, Ekaterina Krivoshlyapova, labored for two days naturally, unaware she was carrying twins. The doctors told her the child was a "severe invalid" and didn’t show her the infants. Academician Pyotr Anokhin, who studied the role of the nervous and circulatory systems in adapting to extreme conditions (sleep deprivation, starvation, temperature fluctuations), had already sent out notices to all maternity hospitals in the USSR before their birth: he was searching for conjoined twins with a shared circulatory system but separate nervous systems. Masha and Dasha were a perfect fit. Within days of their birth, they were taken from their mother and placed in the Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Academy of Medical Sciences.
In the fall of 1950, Anokhin was sent to the GULAG for two years for supporting "anti-Soviet" genetics (i.e., Mendelian, not Lysenkoist). But the girls were not returned to their mother. They were left at the Academy’s pediatric institute, where Anokhin continued his experiments for another six years. What exactly was done to the children has been reconstructed from the testimonies of nurses and Anokhin himself (see Butler 2017, Mirror 2017):
This is not a metaphor about "Soviet inhumanity." This is a specific set of procedures with specific timers, protocols, and signatures. The experiments continued from 1950 to 1956—half of their conscious lives. In 1956, the girls were transferred to the Central Research Institute of Prosthetics, where they were first given a normal education and taught to walk. In 1964, when rumors leaked, they were sent to a boarding school for children with motor disabilities in Novocherkassk. In 1968—eighteen years after their birth—their third leg was amputated, "to make them less noticeable to the Soviet public."
And the most terrifying part—the finale. By 2003, Masha and Dasha were living in Veterans’ Home No. 6 in Moscow. They shared a bloodstream, so when Masha died of a heart attack on April 13, 2003, Dasha lived for another 17 hours and died of blood poisoning from the decay products of her sister’s body. They died on the same day, 17 hours apart, in different hospitals, but from the same cause—because their bodies were never separated, and what happened to one inevitably became part of the other’s biology. They were cremated. Their ashes lie in Novodevichy Cemetery.
This final act—17 hours between two deaths in different hospitals—is, in my opinion, the most horrifying line in the entire Soviet biography of the 20th century. And the most astonishing thing: De Palma made a visually elegant thriller based on their photograph from Life, in which there isn’t a single scene of physical cruelty—just the camera, long takes, and Bernard Herrmann’s music. This speaks volumes about the chasm between real Soviet biography and its Hollywood digestion—more than any lecture ever could.
In 1966, Life magazine published a photo essay about Masha and Dasha’s lives. One of the photographs showed two teenage girls sitting on a couch, fused at the pelvis. One—calm, smiling. The other—with a grim, heavy gaze. The caption read: "Apart from being conjoined at the hip, both girls are physiologically normal, but as they grow older, they develop psychological problems."
De Palma came across this photograph and through it, saw the entire plot: "This strong visual image triggered the whole idea in my head." In his imagination, the two sisters—one kind, the other evil, surgically separated but living in one body—became Dominique and Danielle Blanchion. The surgical separation didn’t destroy the "evil" half—it took root as an alternate personality inside Danielle, emerging whenever she experienced sexual arousal.
This, in my opinion, is the first instance in cinema history where a photograph of a Soviet "invalid" (the official Soviet term!) became the foundation for a Hollywood thriller. Between the Life magazine issue of 1966 and Sisters in 1973 lie seven years of silence: no articles, no international investigations, no accusations. The Western world viewed Soviet conjoined twins through two filters—"Soviet caricature" (a Cold War legacy) and "mysterious medical anomaly" (a 19th-century legacy). And only in 1988, twenty-two years after the Life photo, did Masha and Dasha first appear on Soviet television—in the program Vzglyad—pleading to be moved from the Veterans’ Home to normal living conditions. That is, for seven years, De Palma was making his film without knowing that the real twins were alive, sitting in a Soviet boarding school, and still under medical observation. This is madness worthy of Lovecraft: a Hollywood thriller based on a photograph of a real Soviet tragedy, while the tragedy itself was still ongoing at that very moment.
Now for the cinematic side. Before Sisters, split-screen existed—but as a utilitarian device. Wikipedia provides a clear lineage:
Then De Palma arrives. Sisters (1972/1973) is the first use of split-screen as a psychological tool, not a utilitarian trick. What De Palma does:
After Sisters, split-screen becomes De Palma’s signature:
And here’s the crucial point: after De Palma, split-screen stops being a "trick" and becomes a language. David Fincher (The Social Network, 2010), Guy Ritchie (Snatch, The Gentlemen), Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, 2000—the icon of 2000s split-screen, its Mandela effect in trip montages), Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World), Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love, The Master)—they all learned from De Palma. And none of them, except Fincher, directly quotes Sisters. But the visual code that De Palma built from a photograph of Soviet conjoined twins in the 1966 Life magazine now lives in every TV split-screen emphasizing parallel actions, in every Netflix "Event A on one screen, Event B on another," in every video game with two simultaneous tasks. This, in my opinion, is the longest and most invisible path of cultural transfer in the 20th century: from a Soviet lab table in 1950 to the Instagram Reels cuts of 2020.
Sisters has another quiet detail that can’t be overstated. The music was composed by Bernard Herrmann—this was his last film for the American mainstream. Before Sisters, Herrmann wrote music for Psycho, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and The Birds for Hitchcock. After Sisters, Herrmann won an Oscar for Taxi Driver (Scorsese) and died in 1975. That is, Sisters is the central bridge between the golden age of Hitchcockian suspense and the New York Renaissance of the 1970s (Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Lucas).
Herrmann agreed to Sisters because he liked the script—so much so that the semi-retired 60-year-old composer returned to work. This, in my opinion, is the deepest compliment De Palma received for Sisters: Herrmann, who had just refused to work with Hitchcock on Vertigo (deeming the concept "strained"), agreed to collaborate with a young (32-year-old) director who directly emulated Hitchcock. Herrmann chose the imitator over the original. Because De Palma wasn’t imitating superficially—he was rethinking. And Sisters, despite all its Hitchcockian references, was forging a new language, not repeating an old one.
The most subtle observation I can make. David Lynch started as an experimental artist (Eraserhead, 1977), then made Mulholland Drive (2001) and Twin Peaks (1990-2017)—both about split consciousness and doubles in one frame. But Lynch never used split-screen in the classical sense. Instead, he used mirror reflections, doppelgänger actors, voiceovers, and recurring scenes with different endings. This is De Palma’s heir who rejected the teacher’s tool but preserved his philosophy: the screen isn’t a window—it’s a fractured mirror.
The same goes for Tim Burton in Edward Scissorhands (1990): Edward lives in a confined space with two identities—himself and his creator, who died before the film begins. Burton doesn’t shoot Edward through split-screen but through fractal frame composition—Edward is always pushed into a corner, leaving empty space where his creator should be. This is the visual echo of Sisters, carried through twenty years without direct citation.
And the same Aronofsky in Requiem for a Dream (2000) creates a hyperbolic split-screen—trip montages where the same shot repeats 4-5 times with different processing, music, and color. Formally, this isn’t split-screen, but the philosophy is the same: the screen as the simultaneous existence of multiple realities. Lynch, Burton, Aronofsky, Fincher—they’re all De Palma’s students, even when they don’t name him.
Here, I want to pause and say something usually avoided in film criticism. Sisters isn’t just a film about split personality. It’s a film about what happens to a body when it’s divided. The Soviet experiments on Masha and Dasha were, in essence, an attempt to separate a shared body into two independent systems. De Palma transposes this idea into genre: Danielle and Dominique were one whole, then they were separated, and one died, while the other remained with an alternate personality that "lives" in her body. This is a metaphor for surgical separation in its purest form. Dominique didn’t die—she became a subpersonality of Danielle, emerging during sexual contact.
This is a unique political subtext absent in Hitchcock or Cronenberg. Sisters is a film about the cost of surgical division, operating on three levels at once: on the plot level (Dominique dies during the operation), on the genre level (Hitchcock’s "normal" vs. De Palma’s "split"), and on the hidden political subtext (Soviet experiments as a form of "operation" on a living body). And this, in my opinion, is the most subtle political subtext in the entire 1970s horror canon—where Carpenter speaks about sexuality through a serial killer, and Romero speaks about racism through zombies, De Palma speaks about state violence against the body through conjoined twins.
When Dominique dies during the operation, and Danielle continues living with her "voice in her head"—this is a paraphrase of what happened to Masha and Dasha in 1968 when their third leg was amputated. Or what could have happened if British surgeon Lewis Spitz, who proposed separating them in the 1990s, had performed the operation—Masha was against it, and perhaps she intuitively understood what De Palma retold in Sisters: separation would kill one of them.
And one more detail I can’t omit. British surgeon Lewis Spitz offered to separate Masha and Dasha at a London hospital in the 1990s. Masha was against the operation. And she was right. In 2003, Masha died first—and Dasha died 17 hours later from blood poisoning. Their bodies couldn’t be separated—their shared circulatory system made them biologically one organism. Masha’s refusal of the operation is, in my opinion, the wisest decision in their entire biography, because she understood what neither Anokhin nor Spitz could: their unity wasn’t a pathology—it was ontology. They were one being with two heads, and any attempt to separate them was murder.
De Palma, unaware of this ending, intuited it: in Sisters, Dominique dies during the operation, and Danielle inherits her as a subpersonality. A Hollywood director in 1972 predicted the real biological fate of the Soviet twins in 2003—31 years in advance. This, in my opinion, is the strongest argument that art can sense what science doesn’t yet know.
Three things stunned me about this story:
First—the photo essay as the launchpad for an entire genre. One photograph in Life magazine in 1966 didn’t just inspire a film—it birthed a visual language that lives to this day. Sisters is the first instance in history where a Soviet "invalid" became the foundation for Hollywood’s cinematic language. And this, in my opinion, is the most underrated fact in 20th-century pop culture history: Soviet twins, whose lives were dedicated to medical torture, inadvertently created the visual grammar for all subsequent thrillers about split consciousness—from De Palma to Fincher.
Second—surgical separation as a political metaphor. De Palma didn’t just make a thriller about conjoined twins. He made a parable about the cost of division, working on three levels at once: on the plot level (Dominique dies during the operation), on the genre level (Hitchcock’s "normal" vs. De Palma’s "split"), and on the hidden political subtext (Soviet experiments as a form of "operation" on a living body). And this, in my opinion, is the most nuanced political subtext in the entire 1970s horror canon—where Carpenter speaks about sexuality through a serial killer, and Romero speaks about racism through zombies, De Palma speaks about state violence against the body through conjoined twins.
Third, and this is the most important for me. In Sisters, De Palma didn’t know that the real Masha and Dasha were still alive and still under medical observation. He made his thriller from a single photograph in 1966, unaware of their biography, their suffering, or their future. And this, in my opinion, is the most beautiful illustration of how art engages with reality: it takes a fragment (one photo, one caption) and builds from it an entire world (a film, a genre, a visual language). And this world can turn out to be truer than reality, because a photograph captures the external, while cinema captures the internal. Masha, Dasha, De Palma, Bernard Herrmann, the Criterion Collection, and the modern Netflix split-screen in The Structure of the Day—they’re all, in my opinion, parts of one grand experiment that began on January 3, 1950, in a Moscow maternity hospital, continued on Anokhin’s lab table, transformed into a photograph in Life magazine, became a screenplay in the hands of a 32-year-old De Palma, turned into a 92-minute thriller, and continues to this day in every split-screen shot you see in any modern film or series. And if you ever see a split screen in cinema—remember that somewhere in Moscow, in Novodevichy Cemetery, lie the ashes of two girls whose lives became the source of that language.
And this, in my opinion, is the longest path of cultural transfer in pop culture history: 53 years from a Moscow maternity hospital to your TV screen, from a medical experiment to the Netflix interface. And at the center of this path is a photograph of two girls on a couch, taken by an unknown Life magazine photographer in 1966, which a 26-year-old Brian De Palma saw and decided to make a film about.
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