Mad, Bad And Dangerous?

Since its origin, cinema has had an uneasy relationship with science and technology: scientists are almost always impossibly mad or impossibly saintly, and technology is usually very bad for you. In Mad, Bad and Dangerous? Christopher Frayling explores the genealogy of the cinematic scientist in films made in western Europe and, especially, in Hollywood, showing how the fictional scientist has often been used to represent the prevailing phobias of the time: in the 1920s it was poison gas, in the 1950s it was botched atomic research, and today it is genetic engineering; in the meantime, the traditional 'mad scientist' has made way for the nameless lab genius controlled by global corporations. But there are surprising consistencies too ...

Christopher Frayling is rector of the Royal College of Art, London, chairman of the Arts Council of England, and the author of Spaghetti Westerns and Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, among others.