Mad scientist

The year 1896 saw the publication of H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, in which the titular doctor—a controversial vivisectionist—has isolated himself entirely from civilisation in order to continue his experiments in surgically reshaping animals into humanoid forms, heedless of the suffering he causes.

Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927) brought the archetypical mad scientist to the screen in the form of Rotwang, the evil genius whose machines had originally given life to the dystopian city of the title.

[12] Rotwang's laboratory influenced many subsequent movie sets with its electrical arcs, bubbling apparatus, and bizarrely complicated arrays of dials and controls.

Even his mechanical right hand has become a mark of twisted scientific power, echoed notably in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and in the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) by Philip K.

The sadistic human experimentation conducted under the auspices of the Nazis, especially those of Josef Mengele, and the invention of the atomic bomb, gave rise in this period to genuine fears that science and technology had gone out of control.

A common stereotype of a mad scientist
Peter Cushing as Victor Frankenstein in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Horace B. Carpenter as Dr. Meirschultz, a scientist attempting to bring the dead back to life in the 1934 film Maniac
Bela Lugosi as Dr. Paul Carruthers, the mad scientist protagonist of the poverty row horror film The Devil Bat (1940). Slighted at his workplace, the chemist Carruthers breeds giant bats to attack his wealthy employers.