QAGOMA’s Australian Cinémathèque is going mad for its latest cinema program, exploring film’s most ghastly creations, evil schemes and experiments gone wrong. Mad Science delves into the history of sci-fi cinema with a showcase of science and scientists.

Laugh at campy comedies, shudder at haunting horrors and gasp at fun thrillers as this vast range of movies considers power, humanity and ethics in the context of science. Spanning the early 1920s to contemporary cinema, the program stitches narratives where our thirst for scientific investigation has maybe gotten out of hand. Screenings include early horror classics such as Frankenstein (1931) and its campy counterpart Bride of Frankenstein (1935), to Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The City of Lost Children (1995) and modern re-imaginings of researchers pushing the boundaries like Poor Things (2023). The range has been curated down to a science.