MAN MADE MONSTER LOBBY CARDS

MAN MADE MONSTER, released on March 28, 1941 by Universal Pictures, starred Lon Chaney, Jr., Lionel Atwill and Anne Nagel. Chaney was busy during this period and played in five more movies after this before his most famous monster role in THE WOLF MAN.

IN PRAISE OF THE MAD SCIENTIST

Pity the poor mad scientist. All they try to do is to help out mankind with their admittedly sometimes crazy notions. Never mind that the occasional monster is created that wreaks havoc or an accidental catastrophe or two occurs.

One thing for sure, they can almost always be inciting, and this is the term that author Nick Cutter uses to explain the mad scientist's motivation in this article from the Crime Reads site.

An Aria to the Mad Scientist

"[A] mad scientist is a veritable cornucopia of incendiary incidents. They’re forever pushing the plot forward."

By Nick Cutter | May 27, 2026 | Crimereads.com

There’s a term you’ll hear in fiction writing, the “inciting event.” Loosely stated, it’s an event that kicks the protagonist out of their quotidian state, unsettles their personal world—or, perhaps, the greater sum of humanity of which they are a part—and forces them to act.

Sometimes, there can be a cascading effect when it comes to such events. Sometimes, what feels at first blush to be the inciting event is in fact precipitated by the true inciting event. Was the bank robbery the inciting event? No, it was the cancer diagnosis the robber’s wife received that forced her husband (with his long-buried criminal past) to return to his old crew and to bad habits.

Each genre has its own realm of standard inciting events. Some of the more common are: murder of a loved one (revenge arc), the mysterious invitation, a protagonist’s past comes back to haunt them… We’ve all read and loved novels that use these flashpoints to generate narrative momentum and up the stakes.

Have I myself utilized various inciting events? Of course, as has almost any writer seeking page-turning propulsion. But it’s also quite common for me to utilize an inciting character type. Those stock but malleable characters that tend to pop up in all sorts of books. Some of them are generally benevolent. The kindly uncle with or without a dark past. The kindly next-door neighbor who knows where the bodies are buried (often literally).

Some types are much less benign. The femme fatale. The contract killer. The elderly couple who are far more dangerous than they initially appear.

For me—for the stories I write—my most common inciting character, who keeps turning up in my work like a doomy bad penny, is the Mad Scientist.

Why do I so often gravitate to that type? Well, as I said above, if inciting events are a needful hallmark of narrative progression, a mad scientist is a veritable cornucopia of incendiary incidents. They’re forever pushing the plot forward. How? In as many ways as a novelist can dream up. They create conundrums of every type—physical, moral, psychological, philosophical—and force other characters to react to, cope with, and survive the threats they’ve set in motion.

A list of mad scientists in literature would exhaust the limits of this short essay and be rather pointless anyway, as anyone reading this can summon a handful without prompting. Perhaps, the most famous—the ne plus ultra, the template—is Victor Frankenstein. Mary Shelley’s second most famous creation embodies everything that so fascinates both writers and readers about the character type. Victor is brilliant and ambitious (to the point of being out of touch with humanity and its moral concerns), he’s blindered, headstrong and isolationist and romantically doomed… and maybe, most crucially (or to me this is so), he really wants to help.

This is the most fascinating element of the character type, what makes it so rich on an emotional level. The ideas of many a mad scientist at their most core definition are often good. Or they aspire to be so, at least. They could conceivably benefit mankind. Broken by the death of his mother, Victor Frankenstein’s goal was to banish disease, deny death, and create a new order of life. Was that all bad? On the range of human endeavor from penicillin to the atom bomb, I’d tender that it sat somewhere between those two poles. But like all mad scientists (this being the crucial facet of the type), Victor was so blinkered by his superiority complex, his singlemindedness, that he never gave any thought to the ripple effects of his ambitions: how it could all go so spectacularly and horridly awry.

Well, that was fine. Mary Shelley had it covered.

Take John Hammond, billionaire owner of Jurassic Park. Wouldn’t it be nice, he must’ve thought, to build a secure park on an isolated island (islands—ideally volcanic ones—are the known habitues of mad scientists and a great deal of evil geniuses, too), where dinosaurs are conjured back into existence via DNA trickery… and if someone should happen to mention that there may be chaotic effects to his plan that he couldn’t possibly forecast, well, in best mad scientist fashion (what a sad lot for a character type that they must always act so relentlessly to type, no better than a train on rails), it was Hammond’s duty to fob off such dire warnings as so much poppycock. And then… well, we know the rest.

But was Hammond’s concept bad? Was it wrong? I’d argue that in another writer’s hands it may’ve been positively utopian. Jurassic Park opens to much fanfare and goes on to rival Disney World as a tourist destination, just as Hammond forecasted. But this was a Crichton book, so we knew that wasn’t going to happen. Frankly, it wouldn’t have been nearly as fun.

What about Dr. Moreau and his island of human-beast hybrids? I suppose one can argue that there wasn’t much noble good to be mined from that particular experiment. H. G. Wells himself labelled the novel “an exercise in youthful blasphemy,” but the world was a great deal more puritanical in those days. Wells, like Crichton, was a devotee of the mad scientist character, as evidenced by The Invisible Man, The Time Machine, When the Sleeper Wakes, and of course, Moreau. If Moreau’s experiment wasn’t expressly good, and it’s hard to find how it might benefit mankind (or animal-kind), he emblemized all else that we love and hate about the character type: the odd charisma, the unfailing belief in oneself, the Promethean hubris that it takes to force the disastrously magnificent consequences that such narratives demand.

When you think about it, factually good science—by which I mean science that has actually been put into use in the real world, benefitting humanity—is kind of… boring.

Jonas Salk, Banting and Best, Alexander Fleming… the fathers of the polio vaccine, insulin, and penicillin… have books been written about them? Sure. Biographies. Have films been made? Dry documentaries.

Have any of them had the cultural impact and cache of Victor Frankenstein, who has been endlessly imitated in the years since Mary Shelley wrote him into existence?

Bad science, morally grey science, mad science that goes haywire and berserk, is fictively fascinating. Good and ethical science… you may as well watch paint dry.

So here’s to the Mad Scientists. May they go on gerrymandering with the stuff of life on their isolated islands, inciting ever more dire events, until the sun collapses into a wormhole.

A GALLERY OF MAD SCIENTISTS

Besides the monsters themselves, the mad scientist or mad doctor is probably the most often-used villain in horror movies. Here's a look at some of these various mad men from over the years.

Lionel Atwill in Man Mad Monster.

Boris Karloff in House of Frankenstein.

Peter Cushing in Curse of Frankenstein.

Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster.

Onslow Stevens in House of Dracula.

Colin Clive in Frankenstein.

Henry Hull in Werewolf of London.

Ernest Thesiger in The Bride of Frankenstein.

Basil Rathbone in The Mad Doctor.

Peter Lorre and Frances Drake in Mad Love.

Claude Rains in The Invisible Man.

Boris Karloff in The Invisible Ray.

Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

Leo G. Carroll in Tarantula.

Keep one of these handy in case you come across one of these characters!

THE PHANTOM CREEPS!

Universal's 1939 12-chapter serial THE PHANTOM CREEPS is another variation of the "mad scientist" theme. Bela Lugosi is Dr. Alex Zorka whose mad machinations focus on bringing the world to its knees. Add a giant robot (played by Edward Wolff), a dash of foreign spies and a sprinkle of G-Men and we've got another science-fiction/horror/crime potboiler in which Lugosi plays the menacing villain. It was the last of his serial appearances and the 112th that Universal produced.

Starring Robert Kent, Dorothy Arnold, Regis Toomey and Edward Van Sloan, a young Lee J. Cobb is also in a scene using archival footage. No info on who made the "Phantom" robot, but it's likely that Jack Pierce did the makeup considering he was still on board at Universal.

Released in January 1939, it offered theater-goers respite from the dark clouds of war forming overhead.

THE PHANTOM CREEPS was adapted in comic book form in MOVIE COMICS #6 (September-October 1939 by Picture Publications, Inc., an imprint of DC Comics. C. Elbert was editor, Max Gaines was managing editor and Sheldon Mayer was assistant editor. The scriptwriter is unknown and art is by Jack Adler and Emery Gondor using airbrush to touch-up the photos and adding additional line art. A pretty good job is done in encapsulating the 265-minute film is just seven short pages. Lugosi's first name, Alex is misnamed Alec.

Learn more about DC's MOVIE COMICS HERE.

Various one-sheet movie posters:

Pressbook:

Production stills:

Have a creepy week!

MAD SCIENTIST NO. 33 NOW AVAILABLE

This just in...

Mad Scientist #33 is back from the printer and ready to ship! Just check out this spectacular wraparound cover by John Rozum. It's a cut paper collage with multiple 3D layers features the cast and creatures of the classic Willis O'Brien film, The Lost World!

This issue is the first theme issue in almost 20 years of the magazine. Every article in the issue covers dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals in films, books, and more, spanning from the 1920s to the 1970s!

Contents

• A full-color, cut paper collage wraparound cover by John Rozum
• I Bid You Welcome... (Editorial)
• The Lost World (1925)!
• Prehistoric Big Little Book!
• Prehistoric monsters at the North and South Poles!
• Hammer Sequels That Time Forgot!
• When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!
• Dinosaur Viewmasters!
• Monster Profile: Rhedosaurus!

Plus more!

Order your copy HERE.

And while you're at it, why not pick up a back issue or two, including issue #30 that has my retrospective of Eddie Cahn's 50s fearjerker, THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE!

MAD SCIENTIST NO. 32 NOW SHIPPING!

The Summer 2017 issue of Martin Alt's sweet 'zine, MAD SCIENTIST (#32) is now available for purchase. A new issue of MS is always a good thing and is guaranteed monster goodness. Just check out that fab cover by fan fave Mark Maddox.

Here is the contents for issue #32:

MAD SCIENTIST
#32 (Summer 2017)

TABLE OF CONTENTS:   

A full-color wraparound cover by Mark Maddox
I Bid You Welcome... (Editorial)
Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster!
Journey to the Beginning of Time!
Daigoro vs. Goliath!
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea!
Matango!
Aurora Monster Models!
Mad Scientist in Japan!
Art by Paul Roche and John Rozum
Plus more!

Order your copy by clicking HERE. And, while you're at it, why not pick up a copy of issue #30, too -- it includes my feature on the B-movie thriller, THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE!

MAD SCIENTIST NO. 31 NOW AVAILABLE

The latest issue of MAD SCIENTIST (#31) is now available for online ordering. Here is a lineup of the contents from the website:

A full-color cover by Mark Maddox

I Bid You Welcome... (Editorial)

The Thing From Another World!

Toho's Dracula!

Doctor Who Season 13!

Monsters at the movies!

Godzilla Raids Again!

Mary Shelley's Last Man!

Art by Andy Bennett, Allen Koszowski, and John Rozum

Plus more!

MAD SCIENTIST is a very nicely done fan magazine devoted to all types of monsters from vintage to current.

You can order a copy HERE.

And while you're at it, why don't you add a copy of issue #30, where yours truly has an article on THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE!