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Even though Universal Pictures’ 1930s and 1940s terror tales made famous a series of now-iconic creatures, the original Frankenstein faithfully adapted its dark fiction inspiration in showing that sometimes, the actual villainy isn't perpetrated by a monstrous being of the night. Often it’s the work of a physician who’s gone mad with macabre research ambition.

A couple of non-studio horror movies from this time serve as a particularly captivating double feature for fans of fiends and/or deranged research: Doctor X from 1932, and Mad Love from 1935.

Doctor X: Pre-Code Terror featuring Early Color

Doctor X — which gets a reference in the song of The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s first musical piece — united a number of prominent Hollywood stars before they created their best-known work.

The actor Lionel Atwill eventually turned into a regular actor in the famous Frankenstein movies. Fay Wray stars in this picture two years ahead of she became one of the most famous horror heroines in history in the original King Kong. And they’re helmed by director Michael Curtiz, who eventually created The Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce, and even Casablanca, along with other films.

Doctor X isn’t nearly so classy as the director’s acclaimed masterpieces, but the transgression is glorious: This movie was made before the MPAA and prior to the content regulations that forbade themes like cannibalism, peeping scenes, body harvesting, and mind violence.

Moreover, the film was created with the two-strip Technicolor technique, an early form of color cinematography which imparts the movie strange green and pink tints that imply a reality like ours, but intensified and off.

And seen today, post-era of Universal’s wolf-men, transparent entities, and etc., Doctor X’s whodunit storyline feels increasingly like a clever creature-feature deception. A sequence of gruesome flesh-eating homicides happening under a full moon appears to be the doing of a dreadful creature. But persons of interest headed by Dr. Xavier are still assembled for an inquiry, featuring macabre recreations of the crime locations.

The Mad Love Film: Peter Lorre and Macabre Strange Tales

Mad Love is less of a puzzle: Any film starring Peter Lorre simplifies it to surmise who the culprit could be. When lead Stephen Orlac suffers hand amputation in an incident, he turns to Dr. Gogol, who sadly grows infatuated with Stephen’s wife Yvonne.

Gogol performs a grafting procedure on poor Stephen, giving him the mitts of a knife-throwing maniac, in trying to stealing Yvonne away.

Mad Love isn’t as frantic as the human against appendage humor of Evil Dead 2, but it contains elements of that devilish oddity, gaining greatly from the large number of Peter Lorre moments. The pair of features are stranger and more unsettling than the majority of Frankenstein sequels, and they are superb at the comparable domain as the best iconic fiend movies: obscuring the boundary between fiend and person, in these cases with a surgical expertise incorporated in the equation.

Viewing Options

Both movies are available to streaming or download through popular digital platforms. Mad Love is accessible for viewing for complimentary on specific commercial sites, though audiences should beware regarding potential image proportion distortions.