A Century of Stealing Fire
From right to left, actors Richard O'Brien, Tim Curry and Patricia Quinn as Riff Raff, Dr Frank-N-Furter and Magenta respectively, on a lobby card from the 1975 musical comedy 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show', produced by 20th Century Fox. (Photo by Movie Poster Image Art / Getty Images)
The first mad scientist was Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. Her 1818 novel’s subtitle dubs Frankenstein “the modern Prometheus”: a man who usurps the power of the gods using modern technology. Shelley invented her mad scientist figure amid the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, and Frankenstein’s successors have continued to channel our anxieties about whether we can control technological progress. By one count, 30% of horror movies distributed in the UK between the 1930s and the 1980s featured mad scientists or their creations as villains.
Here are some of the best nutty professors and evil geniuses to ever appear on film.
Metropolis
C. A. Rotwang
Fritz Lang’s pathbreaking German expressionist silent film was the first major science-fiction movie; it also brought the mad scientist to the silver screen. Inventor C. A. Rotwang, played by Rudolf Klein-Rogge, builds a robot in an attempt to resurrect his lost love. His creation gets swept up in an allegory for the political turmoil of Weimar Germany: the city’s brutal oligarchs want it to impersonate a kidnapped working-class leader, while Rotwang plans to use it to spark his own revolution. After the robot incites a destructive worker uprising, viewers learn the virtues of class compromise, and Rotwang falls to his death.
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