Excerpt from the chapter on Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932):
The most believable aspect of Lugosi's Mirakle comes from the assumption that he is not actually a doctor of medicine at all, but rather a delusional crackpot who pursues his "science" as more of an obsessive hobby in between carnival gigs. With this leap of logic, everything about Mirakle suddenly makes perfect sense: his abandoned warehouse laboratory, the incompetent thug assistant, the irrational theories of cross-species transfusions, his rather unpleasant bedside manner, the belief that he is actually fluent in gorilla-talk, the fact that he gives an injection like he's carving his name in an oak tree with a penknife. All of these ludicrous character traits easily support the logical conclusion that he is not a mad scientist so much as is is, quite simply and wonderfully, mad.
The most believable aspect of Lugosi's Mirakle comes from the assumption that he is not actually a doctor of medicine at all, but rather a delusional crackpot who pursues his "science" as more of an obsessive hobby in between carnival gigs. With this leap of logic, everything about Mirakle suddenly makes perfect sense: his abandoned warehouse laboratory, the incompetent thug assistant, the irrational theories of cross-species transfusions, his rather unpleasant bedside manner, the belief that he is actually fluent in gorilla-talk, the fact that he gives an injection like he's carving his name in an oak tree with a penknife. All of these ludicrous character traits easily support the logical conclusion that he is not a mad scientist so much as is is, quite simply and wonderfully, mad.
