Robert Ledgard (The Skin I Live In)
As is usual for a Pedro Almodóvar film, The Skin I Live In contains more betrayals, secret identities, acts of vengeance, and other such twistiness in two hours than most soap operas fit in an entire season. What is less usual is that this web of melodrama centers around a plastic surgeon, Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), who pursues the development of an artificial skin called GAL in the secrecy of his secluded estate. While many of the individual elements of Ledgard’s mad science, from murder to kidnapping people for research purposes, are common mad scientist tropes, Almodóvar dials everything up to 11 and styles it with such panache that he turns it into something all its own.
Dr. Otto “Doc Ock” Octavius (Spider-Man 2)
A tragic mad scientist in the vein of The Fly, Dr. Octavius (Alfred Molina) seeks to build a sustainable fusion power reactor. It’s a lot of hard, delicate work, so he develops a set of artificially intelligent mechanical arms to help himself out. The reactor overloads and becomes unstable, but Octavius hesitates to shut it off, with tragic consequences—his wife dies and the AI mechanical arms he built fuse to his body, where they soon start influencing his thoughts and sending him on a rampage of destruction. He regains enough control, in the end, to sacrifice himself and sabotage his own evil plan.
Rotwang (Metropolis)
With his vaguely Albert Einstein-like hair and sunken eyes, the inventor villain of Fritz Lang’s silent film epic Metropolis is generally regarded as a prototypal movie mad scientist. A crazed inventor still in love with a woman who left him decades earlier for another man, Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) creates an android which he intends to use to resurrect her—until his boss orders him to use the robot to impersonate Maria (Brigitte Helm), a woman stirring up rebellious sentiments in the underground workers. His scheme is eventually revealed, and he falls to his death in a final showdown with the film’s hero, Freder (Gustav Fröhlich), in traditional villain fashion.
Dr. Mabuse (Dr. Mabuse the Gambler)
For those unfamiliar, Dr. Mabuse is basically what would happen if the James Bond franchise revolved around a Bond villain instead of Agent 007, only filmed decades before Bond was even written. Criminal genius, psychologist, and master of disguise, Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) runs his Berlin-based criminal empire armed with telekinesis and mind control. He’s a force to be reckoned with, and a clear predecessor to many of cinema’s greatest villains, including the Joker and Hannibal Lecter. By the end of Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, Mabuse has been caught and locked away in a madhouse—but not to worry, that won’t hold him back for long.
Between this and Metropolis, director Fritz Lang can be seen as one of the defining filmmakers in terms of codifying mad scientists, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge a definitive mad scientist actor.
Dr. Warren Chapin (The Tingler)
Pathologist Dr. Warren Chapin (Vincent Price) discovers a parasite he dubs the “Tingler” which attaches to a person’s spine and feeds on fear. If allowed to grow strong enough, the Tingler is capable of crushing a person’s spine and killing them. Admittedly, at this point, the plot is clearly nuts but Chapin doesn’t seem particularly insane—until he decides that he needs to scare the bejeezus out of himself in order to study the effects of the Tingler. In order to do this, he injects himself with LSD, the first instance of LSD use in a film. All in all, both a historical milestone and a definite indication of compromised sanity.
Dr. Frank N. Furter (Rocky Horror Picture Show)
Dr. Frank N. Furter (Tim Curry) is a pretty transparent riff off of Dr. Frankenstein, the “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” has a style all their own. While Frank deviates from (hetero)sexual norms, as is typical of mad scientists, what is unusual is that the Transylvanian is not asexual, but quite the opposite—and loving it.
Dr. Moreau (Island of Lost Souls, The Island of Dr. Moreau 1977/1996)
The second member of the (un)holy trinity of classic mad scientists alongside Dr. Jekyll, Dr. Moreau isn’t the plebian secret basement laboratory kind of mad scientist, but the secret island laboratory kind: “an experimental station of sorts for bioanthropological research,” in the words of 1933[?] version of Moreau (Charles Laughton), still widely regarded as the best movie Moreau to date. Regardless of whether it’s the Laughton, Burt Lancaster (1977), or Marlon Brando (1996) version, Moreau’s basic aim remains the same as it was in H. G. Wells’ 1896 novel—to create human-like beings from animals in his laboratory known as the “House of Pain.” The beast-people eventually revolt, strapping the mad doctor down to his own operating table and bludgeoning him with his own surgical instruments.
Clive Nicoli and Elsa Kast (Splice)
The couple that gene splices together stays together… is absolutely untrue and a very bad idea, as anyone who has seen Splice knows. Romantically involved genetic engineers and research partners Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) work for the subtly named biomedical research lab N.E.R.D. If the opening credits with their x-rays and internal organs overlaid by ominous music don’t clue you in about exactly what to expect from Splice, Elsa’s declaration that a genetically engineered creation resembling a wriggling teratoma the size of a small dog is “so cute!” a few minutes later should do the trick.
However, Clive and Elsa have much more ambitious dreams than chihuahua-sized tumor monsters—they want to create an animal-human hybrid that will ‘revolutionize” science. Their corporate backer quickly vetoes this plan on ethical grounds. However, being mad scientists, Clive and Elsa decide to make their superbeing in secret anyway. It does not go well. As a general rule of thumb, when your corporate backer says “this is unethical,” you know you have probably indeed gone too far.
Dr. Gogol (Mad Love)
After attracting international attention with his tour de force performance as child murderer Hans Beckert in M, Peter Lorre made his American film debut in 1935 as the equally unsettling surgeon Dr. Gogol. While his immense knowledge of the human body is clear in his renowned surgical reputation, his utter social dysfunction is similarly evident. Obsessed with actress Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake) who finds him entirely repulsive, Gogol is the sort of man who, as his housekeeper informs, “never misses a head-chopping.”
While Gogol is strange from the outset, it’s after he performs an experimental hand transplant surgery on Yvonne’s husband Stephen (ironically enough, former Dr. Frankenstein Colin Clive) in an attempt to save his career as a concert pianist following a train accident that things really start spiraling. Gogol’s obsession with Yvonne becomes more and more aggressive while Stephen finds his new hands clumsy at the piano but incredibly skilled at knife-throwing (and in possession of a temper capable of acting independently of his will). Gogol has a total mental meltdown complete with hallucinations, including a pep-talking doppelganger proclaiming, “You can conquer love.” Complicated disguises and life-size statue replicas get involved. Of course, the film has the requisite “love wins” ending, with Stephen putting his newfound knife-throwing skills to good use and killing Gogol to save Yvonne. The married couple embraces in what is presumably supposed to imply “and they lived happily ever after,” but Stephen still has angry murder-hands over which he has limited control, which really seems like a ticking time bomb as far as the prognosis for that domestic bliss is concerned.
Dr. Frankenstein (Frankenstein)
“IT’S ALIVE!”
The issue with calling Dr. Frankenstein “the one, the only” ultimate mad scientist is that he is not really, cinematically speaking, one man at all. There have been many Dr. Frankensteins to grace the screen over the years, often even sporting different first names. But whether they go by Henry or Victor or pronounce their surname “Franken-STEEN,” at the end of the day, the ultimate goal remains the same: discover the secret of life, and then use it to create life from death.
The influence of Frankenstein, the third and most iconic member of the (un)holy trinity of classic mad scientists, is hard to overstate, whether looking at movies or fiction more generally or even real life. Whenever debates regarding genetic engineering or anything that could be deemed manipulation of life—stem cell research, etc.—references to Dr. Frankenstein and his transgressions are never far away, a veritable Godwin’s law for bioethical discussion. Going back to the movies, while at least three silent film adaptations were made of Mary Shelley’s novel (the earliest being the 1910 Frankenstein produced by Edison Studios), the real gamechanger was James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein. In her encyclopedic history of horror Nightmare Movies, Kim Newman calls the film “the most famous horror film of all.” The second-most famous film version of Frankenstein, Terence Fisher’s 1957 The Curse of Frankenstein, is also a cinematic landmark. As Hammer Film Productions’ breakthrough hit with U.S. audiences, it kickstarted the studio’s most profitable and prominent period as the foremost purveyor of richly colored gothic horror. While Whale brought the most iconic monster to life with Boris Karloff, for my money the superior movie Dr. Frankenstein is Peter Cushing’s addictively sinister portrayal of unhinged megalomania bubbling under a poised veneer.
Editor’s note: shout out to Young Frankenstein, as well.
Conclusion
The bad news is that a disproportionate number of movie scientists have completely lost the plot. That said, there is good news. First, movie scientists have minimal relation to actual scientists (The Martian, in my experience, is perhaps the only film where all the scientist characters genuinely remind me of actual scientists). Second, the vast majority, both featured in this list and otherwise, end up dead by the end of the movie and therefore unable to do any further damage, fictional or otherwise.
NOTE: While Dr. Caligari from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is often cited as another prototypal mad scientist, as anyone who has actually seen the film knows, the ending suggests that Caligari is, in reality, not actually mad at all. As such, in spite of his importance as an early mad scientist image, he was excluded from this list.
Related Topics: Big List, David Cronenberg, Science, Science Fiction
