The Mad Scientist

A staple of the horror movie is the mad scientist, and with good reason. The purpose of the horror film is to present a deformed destructive being (DDB), and the mad scientist, through his demented experiments, produces just that: a monster that is new, unnatural, and terrifying. In so doing, he is almost an avatar of the filmmaker, doing within the movie what the filmmaker tries to do through the movie.

The granddaddy of mad scientists is Colin Clive as Henry Frankenstein in Frankenstein. With his intense, neurotic look, his tendency toward screeching, his desire to play God, he set the pattern for mad scientists throughout horror film history. The DDB he created from dead flesh, the Frankenstein monster, was the pattern for later experimental monstrosities.

An ethical rule of horror films that Frankenstein violated is the rule prohibiting tampering with nature, often set in a religious context (God is the ruler of nature; therefore, altering nature is forbidden). This rule continued to be violated in future films. In The Invisible Man, the title character confesses on his deathbed, "I meddled in things that man must leave alone." Invisibility might not seem like such a sacrilegious thing to aim for, but in the horror film any monkeying around with nature can be disastrous.

The mad scientist is always trying some new alteration of nature: teleportation in The Fly; turning animals into people in The Island of Lost Souls; reviving the dead in Re-Animator; separating out the good and evil components of man in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; creating a twelve-limbed humanoid in The Human Centipede; reconstructing alien DNA in Species. The plan is always to create something that can be controlled, but the experiment always turns on the creator; the DDB breaks its bounds. This is true whether the DDB is, respectively, a fly-human hybrid, animal-men, crazed zombies, Mr. Hyde, the human centipede, or a deadly Natasha Henstridge.

The mad scientist is sometimes remorseful for what he has done, but sometimes he doesn't care. Peter Cushing's Frankenstein in the Hammer Frankenstein series never seemed repentant for his monstrosities. In any case, we can expect more mad scientists in horror movies, because they are so successful in creating DDBs.

George Ochoa
Author
Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films

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Low-Budget Bela

Horror is one genre where a little goes a long way. Unlike, say, the Biblical or historical epic, where a big budget is practically required for good results, in the horror genre a little money spent judiciously can produce a satisfying movie. An example is The Corpse Vanishes, a 1942 chiller starring Bela Lugosi.

The popular impression of Lugosi is that he was a pathetic, even tragic figure who descended from the heights of playing Dracula through drug addiction and cheap movies, to end up filming awful productions with Ed Wood. Some of this is true. But what is too often forgotten is how good his work was in many of those cheap movies, including The Corpse Vanishes. Made for the Poverty Row studio Monogram, Corpse is surprisingly entertaining, with a great deal to recommend it, including Lugosi.

To start with, Corpse has a wonderfully bizarre premise: mad scientist Dr. Lorenz (Lugosi) is murdering (or at least rendering catatonic) brides at the altar, then abducting their bodies to supply glandular serum to keep his aging wife youthful. He kills the brides with orchids he has hybridized to deliver poison through their scent. The movie gets crazier from there. Lorenz has three servants, one a dwarf, one a deformed brute, and one the other servants' mother, who is always trying to protect her sons from Lorenz's propensity to whip and threaten them. Lorenz and his wife sleep in coffins. Lorenz plays the organ. His house has secret passages. And on and on, all packed into 64 minutes.

The normals are a nosy female reporter, Patricia Hunter (Luana Walters), and her love interest, Dr. Foster (Tristram Coffin). Neither of them are good actors, but they put over their roles adequately, and fuse into the heterosexual couple that horror films of the period liked to leave as survivors at the end. In any case, the normals are always less important in a horror movie than the deformed destructive being, or DDB. That is Lorenz, deformed in virtue of his insanity and immorality, and destructive in virtue of his homicidality.

Lugosi is typically suave and sinister in this role, smiling with menace, making the audience believe he is what is presented: a man whose hobby is horticulture, who likes to sleep in a coffin, who will kill at a moment's notice, who keeps a dwarf, and who is devoted to keeping a mad old wife alive and youthful. The figure of this DDB makes the movie worthwhile. And all on a Monogram budget.

George Ochoa

Author

Deformed and Destructive Beings: The Purpose of Horror Films