“Mad Scientists,” the Season 3 finale of Eli Roth’s History of Horror, stitches together Promethean overreachers and preeminent speakers…
Leonard Maltin: Mary Shelley created an archetype in Doctor Frankenstein. He’s been copied. He’s been cloned. He’s been spoofed. But he exists in our consciousness in a way that very few characters 100 years, 150 years old, still do.
Quentin Tarantino: That’s where the mad scientist really kind of comes into his own. Because the whole concept of Peter Cushing as Doctor Frankenstein, and the whole concept of those [Hammer] films, is it’s the doctor that’s the monster.
Axelle Carolyn: There’s always that frontier that science is not supposed to cross, and we’re forever pushing it back. And now we’re talking about cloning people, you know, the ethics behind all the scientific decisions that we’re making today are actually echoed in all those movies back in the 30’s.
Andrew Kevin Walker: Altered States is a movie that’s both completely lowbrow genre, and at the same time, the highest kind of highbrow art. Altered States is so existentially and scientifically rigorous, but it still has a thing popping open and a guy jumping out as a Neanderthal man.
David J. Skal: The beast people rising up [in Island of Lost Souls] is almost like a Bolshevik Revolution. America wasn’t hashing this out on an intellectual level, but it certainly was on a pop cultural level.
Jessica Rothe: [Ex Machina] was such an interesting exploration into our dependency on technology, and AI, and the development of it, and what makes a person a person. But like in some ways, Alicia Vikander’s character was more humane and more of a human than our protagonist. […] What is so amazing about that character is you’re rooting for her the whole time. You think that she is the victim in this situation, but the tables turn quite quickly.
Rebekah McKendry: There’s no judging in [The Rocky Horror Picture Show] whatsoever. It just is. And the gender fluidity of Brad and Janet and that sexuality across the board is just separated, and gender boundaries get completely broken down in it. That is something we weren’t seeing in a lot of cinema at the time, so it felt dangerous, it felt transgressive, it felt like we were seeing something completely different.
Heidi Honeycutt: Look, you’re not gonna watch the new Invisible Man and feel the terror the same way that a woman who has been in an abusive, controlling relationship would feel. But I’ll say this. Everybody has trauma, and everybody experiences the bad stuff. And if you haven’t, don’t worry, you will. And that’s part of why people make horror films. It’s a cathartic way to express those terrors and those horrors in a safe way.