Dr. Cyclops

Dr. Cyclops is a 1940 American science fiction horror film from Paramount Pictures, produced by Dale Van Every and Merian C. Cooper, directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack, and starring Thomas Coley, Victor Kilian, Janice Logan, Charles Halton, Frank Yaconelli and Albert Dekker. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects (by Farciot Edouart and Gordon Jennings) at the 13th Academy Awards. Fantasy and science fiction writer Henry Kuttner wrote a novelette adapting the film's story that appeared in the June 1940 issue of the pulp magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories. Plot In his primitive laboratory, somewhere in the Peruvian jungle, mad scientist Alexander Thorkel attempts to shrink all of humanity to reduce impact on the environment. At one point, he summons a team of ace biologists from America to examine a specimen in his microscope, since his eyesight is too poor for him to do so himself. One of them identifies iron crystal contamination, much to Thorkel's satisfaction. He then thanks them for their services and asks them to leave. Annoyed that they have travelled thousands of miles for nothing, they set up camp in Thorkel's stockade. There, they discover the area is rich with pitchblende, an ore of uranium and radium. Thorkel reveals he is shrinking living creatures, using radiation piped in from a radium deposit down a deep shaft. He invites the biologists to observe his apparatus, then locks them inside his radiation chamber, where they are shrunk to twelve inches.