Witness our DARK DESIGNS…

 

From Jeffery X. Martin:

When you're a young horror fan, you get exposed to the imagery of mad scientists almost immediately. Your parents won't let you watch the real blood and guts stuff when you're little, but for some reason, Frankenstein is all right. No big deal. Just grotesque physical deformities, graverobbing, an attempt to bring the dead back to life and angry mobs inciting violent riots. Here you go, Junior. Have some chocolate milk. Enjoy the show.

It was The Tingler with Vincent Price that really sucked me into the genre. That movie gave me nightmares for years. The interesting thing about that is the movie eschews a lot of the mad science tropes. There's no hidden laboratory with a Jacob's Ladder buzzing madly in the corner. It involves pure science, making a strange discovery, and being practically unable to control it. In a lot of ways The Tingler is the spiritual grandfather of movies like Splice and Lucy.

We're surrounded by science, yet a majority of us know very little about it. How many of us can correctly explain how electricity gets into those thin little wires? What kinds of household chemicals can be mixed to create weapons of destruction? How do you explain the empty space between particles of matter? We enjoy the products of science, but we don't fully comprehend it. "I don't know," we say. "It's all computers and shit."

Well, computers are science.

Life is science.

So is death.

The quest to understand our own existence is the true genesis of the genre we celebrate in this anthology. The more we learn, the more questions we have about the world, the universe, even our own bodies. We are mysteries unto ourselves. Atoms and quarks, platelets and islets, sweat, shit and piss. We're all made of mad science, baby, so why not cross some lines? Find out what's really going on and damn the consequences? What's the worst that could happen? Do you really want to know?

 

From Duncan Ralston:

My early appreciation of "mad science" began with the Time-Life Books series Mysteries of the Unknown. When I was young I'd spend hours pouring through these books looking for exciting mysteries of the paranormal and unexplained. I was fascinated by the Egyptian pyramids, the Bermuda Triangle, alien abductions, the Manhattan Project, and the like. But it was the explorations into the limits of the human mind and consciousness, often without the consent of the participants, that interested me the most.

To me the “mad science” subgenre is strongest when dealing with moral quandaries. How far is too far, and would we recognize that line before it’s too late to put the evil back in Pandora’s jar? When J. Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb, witnessed the mushroom cloud over the Trinity nuclear test site he was alleged to have said, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” In the almost 72 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we have yet to see his prophecy come true, but only by the skin of our teeth.

Mad Science speaks of Forbidden Knowledge. We live in an age ruled by science (although many would love for us to return to ignorance), but we are still fearful of the potential terrors lurking within the Unknown. But are we right to be fearful? When Swiss scientists announced their intention to recreate the Big Bang in the Large Hadron Collider, even Stephen Hawking seemed worried about the possibilities. When surgeons are on the verge of transplanting human heads, when scientists have been given the go-ahead to use stems cells to "reactivate" dead human brains, when futurists predict we’ll soon become indistinguishable from the computers we rely on, and tech billionaires convinced we’re living in a computer simulation spend a fortune to break us out of the “matrix,” wouldn’t it be far more ignorant to not be afraid?

 

From Thomas S. Flowers:

Growing up, I never paid much attention to the distinction between horror subgenres. I never really referred to the Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street movies as “slashers.” I never watched Army of Darkness or Young Frankenstein associating them as horror-comedies. Nor did I think Tremors or Gremlins were “creature features.” They were just horror movies to me, at least back then.

The same could be said of mad scientist flicks. When I watched David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1988) for the first time, I didn’t ponder the fate of the mad scientist, I thought I was just watching a really cool monster flick starring the sumptuous Jeff Goldblum. And when my folks took me to see Jurassic Park (also starring dreamboat Goldblum) in 1993, “mad science” was the furthest from my mind.

As I grew older, and became more involved in the horror genre, the meaning and interpretation of subgenres became more defined. Understanding what each subgenre brought to the collective table became more important to me. Sometimes these hidden meanings become intertwined but as I understand it, the subgenre for “mad science” asks and confronts our fears, which is bred in our misunderstanding science. Without knowing or understanding, it becomes easy to fall into what Goldblum stated in Jurassic Park, “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

There have been some really great “mad science” stories in our past; however, unfortunately most of the “mad science” subgenre has been kicked to the proverbial kid’s corner. There just doesn’t seem to be a good sampling of “adult” mad science stories. I hope Dark Designs: Tales of Mad Science, which boasts some of the darkest, creepiest, sickest stories I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading, will alleviate this glaring depression within the Mad Science horror subgenre.