Is There a Doctor in the House? The Evolution of Van Helsing and Frankenstein as Intellectual Archetypes, 1931–1975

Abstract

The mad scientist is one of the most pervasive images in both horror and science fiction film. The depiction of the socially isolated, wild-eyed, disheveled, and obsessive scientific researcher who engages in intellectual pursuits to the exclusion everything else (including moral and ethical considerations) has been so historically common in film as to become stereotypical. Researchers of mass media science fiction and horror have long pointed to the genres’ preoccupation with the relationship between hyper-intellectualism and madness. Far too often scholars have written off this image as one of “knee-jerk anti-intellectualism,” but closer examinations of the characterization have pointed to “a far more complicated symbol of civilization and its split-level discontents.”¹ Especially in the era following Richard Hofstadter’s landmark Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, a tendency has developed in scholarship to explain away the mad scientist icon as another example of the puritanical suspicion of intellect that has typified an important portion of the American character.