Cult-TV Theme Watch: Split Screens

A split screen is a composite shot, or rather, two shots projected/edited simultaneously into the same frame. This time-honored technique of the “split screen” has been used often in cult-TV history so that characters can meet themselves.

And by meet “themselves,” I mean encounter a doppelganger, twin, or self from an alternate, future, or past chronology.

Split screen shots were used extensively in the early first season Star Trek (1966-1969) episode, “What Are Little Girls Made Of.”

There, Captain Kirk (William Shatner) encountered an android duplicate of himself. Although stunt doubles were also utilized, the illusion of “two” Captain Kirks was ultimately sold through the use of split-screen effects, so William Shatner could be seen acting…next to himself.

By the time of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), the split-screen shots were less obvious, or at least less quickly noticeable, and incorporated more movement within the frame to hide the illusion.  In episodes such as “Datalore” and “Time Squared,” Enterprise crew-members interacted with themselves, walking down corridors, sharing turbo-lifts, and so forth.

The mirror universe episodes of Deep Space Nine (1993-1999) also featured split-screens for the scenes in which Kira Nerys (Nana Visitor) met her mirror double, the lascivious Intendant.

A series such as Beyond Westworld (1980) was actually constructed on the premise of android duplicates replacing their human doubles, so split-screen photography was bound to play a significant role. In episodes such as “Brother’s Keeper” (which saw Connie Sellecca’s character face an android double), split-screen shots were crucial to the verisimilitude of the series’ very formula.

The same idea appeared in cult-TV far more recently, in Ringer (2011-2012), a series which saw a woman played by Sarah Michelle Gellar impersonate her wealthy sister in Manhattan. Although the two sisters did not meet often, when they did, split screens were deployed. One such meeting scene set the opposing sisters against a wall of mirrors so that we were seeing not just split screen imagery, but an infinite regression of reflections.

The old staple of the “evil twin” could not have been visualized, in classic cult-TV without the split-screen technique.  Just two examples: we have seen it in use in Man from Atlantis (1978) in “Shoot Out at Land’s Ends,” and in Knight Rider’s (1982-1986) “Goliath,” which introduced the world to Michael Knight’s doppelganger and evil twin, Garth Knight (also played by series star David Hasselhoff).