The Fourth Night of Halloween

ON THE FOURTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I watched Kevin Smith’s Tusk (2014). Predictably, Smith’s intrusive unfunny comedy ruined this for me, even though the sections of genuine atmosphere and psychological terror unquestionably make this his best movie.

Anyway, the Mad Scientist here is once again not actually a scientist. Rather he belongs to that subclass of horror villain we may call the Experimental Surgery Fetishist. Due to a traumatic incident at sea long ago, he has made it his mission to transform people into walruses. He does this by imprisoning them in his backwoods mansion, amputating limbs, sewing together joints, and performing major skin grafts to create jagged human sculptures that resemble walruses in form and function. His motive for doing this is to somehow honor the walrus he forced to kill to survive at sea. He certainly qualifies as mad, in company with the mad doctors from films like Eyes Without a Face, Skin I Live In, Human Centipede, and Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future, who take forced body modification to the furthest extremes in pursuit of some form of twisted love. But as such, they should probably more properly be thought of as Mad Artists than Mad Scientists.