The Twenty Ninth Night of Halloween

ON THE TWENTY NINTH NIGHT OF HALLOWEEN … I finished watching a further series of Mad Scientist horror movies from the past week. These include: The Nest (1988), about genetically altered super-roaches let loose by a shady corporation; The Flesh Eaters (1964), about genetically altered super-amoebas let loose by a Nazi scientist working for a shady corporation; and a re-watch of David Cronenberg’s best mad science films, including The Brood (1979), The Fly (1986), and Crimes of the Future (2022, which inherits its title from Cronenberg’s early student film, about a plague unleashed by a Mad Scientist). 

Cronenberg is known as the great master of body horror. But he should also be known as the great reinventor of mad science horror, as the majority of his films feature the antics of Mad Scientists in some capacity. His masterpiece, The Fly, is perhaps the greatest mad science horror film ever made. The Fly’s protagonist, Seth Brundle, is a tragic hero in the classic Frankenstein mold. He toils selflessly out of exuberant passion for science and a genuine desire to transform the world for the better. But because he must rely for funding on a corporation that jealously guards its secrets in order to maintain monopoly control, Brundle must work in isolation, without the oversight of colleagues to ensure safety. Thus, in a moment of impulsiveness while drunk, there is no one to stop him from using his new machine on himself, which literally does not yet have all the bugs worked out. Thus, like Frankenstein in the original novel, an instance of personal weakness in an otherwise heroic scientist, who has been forced to work in isolation, is all it takes for a worthwhile, potentially revolutionary experiment to produce a gruesome outcome. 

In contrast, Cronenberg’s earlier film The Brood, another masterful work of indelible horror cinema, features the toxic male egotism of Dr. Hal Ragland, who has invented a metaphysical science called “Psychoplasmics” (one of my favorite sci fi jargon terms) that allows him to induce biological parthenogenesis in humans through highly abusive roleplay, under the guise of therapy. Although Dr. Ragland does succeed in his ultimate aim, his self-aggrandizing manipulation and abuse ruins the validity of his work as science.

This key contrast between Brundle and Ragland leads me to my overall thoughts on all of these works of Mad Scientist horror I watched this Halloween month. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best way to break this subgenre down typologically is by using the MMO method of criminal investigation: the MOTIVE of the perpetrator, i.e. the Mad Scientist; the MEANS of the mad experiment; and the OPPORTUNITY, or lack thereof, created by social and institutional circumstances. 

MOTIVE: 

(1) Noble Intent: The Mad Scientist can be driven by the truly noble intent to benefit humanity through good science, making them a tragic hero, e.g. Victor Frankenstein and Seth Brundle. A real world example of this would be Oppenheimer—at least according to Oppenheimer. Another highly debatable real world case, one that is much closer in nature to Frankenstein and Brundle, is that of Chinese scientist He Jiankui, who successfully created the first genetically altered humans by illegally circumventing human experimentation laws and editing the DNA of twin girls in utero to make them HIV immune.

(2) Selfishness: The Mad Scientist can be driven by ego and ambition, which ends up delegitimizing their work when they cut corners to serve their self-interest, e.g. Dr. Ragland. A real world example of this is Dr. Mengele, who let hateful pseudoscience and pointless brutality totally eclipse any legitimacy his work might have had, out of a desire to please his masters and gain more power. 

MEANS: 

(1) Worthwhile Risk: The mad science experiment has a good chance of yielding results that will be highly beneficial to humanity, such that even the (consenting) endangerment of human life is worth the risk, e.g. Brundle’s teleportation project. Various real world experiments in space flight fall under this category.   

(2) Unnecessarily Destructive: The mad science experiment treats human lives as disposable fodder, and may even endanger humanity as a whole, for some minor potential benefit that is negligible compared to the cost, e.g. the mind control experiments in Strange Behavior. A real world example would be our own government’s ghastly attempts at mind control under the MKULTRA project, which left dozens of unwilling human subjects severely brain damaged, while yielding nothing of substantive benefit. 

OPPORTUNITY: 

(1) Open Support: The mad science experiment is conducted in the open, with full public knowledge and the support of major legitimate scientific institutions. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), where the first manned space mission results in an astronaut’s monstrous mutation after he returns to Earth, is one of the very few horror film examples of this. Meanwhile, in the real world, most of mainstream science conducted at academic institutions meets this standard.

(2) Underground: Whether because of the persecution of a superstitious public or the imposed isolation of a power-hungry organization, the mad science experiment must be conducted in secret, with little to no oversight. All of the horror films I watched this month took place underground in this sense—I guess secrecy is just inherently more dramatic. A real world example would be the truly horrific experiments conducted by the Japanese military during World War II at Unit 731, a hellish research institute that is still shrouded in as much official secrecy as Area 51 is in the US. 

So, what emerges from this horror subgenre taken as a whole is an implicit cultural critique of science. This critique suggests that tragedy can only be avoided when legitimate scientists with noble intent receive unrestricted public and institutional support in pursuit of a goal that is worth the risk taken. 

Of course, there are several problems here. First, only the scientists themselves can ever truly know if their motives are pure or are tainted by egotism. Second, it is often only in hindsight that we will know if the promised benefits in fact come to fruition and thereby outweigh the cost. And third, likewise, only in the future will we know if we are now being overly cautious and superstitious in putting limits on certain types of science, or if our caution is warranted. Meanwhile, under neoliberalism, there is not much we can do about power hungry organizations monopolizing and corrupting beneficial scientific innovation. 

These problems create ever-present gaps through which the horrors of mad science can erupt into our world, at any time. And the further science advances, the more horrific these threats become.