I must say I’m still not sure what dark crevice of my mind this bit of dialog in Where Am I? came out of:

TAKAYAMA

Don’t you feel, what is the word? “guilt” at having in effect murdered one of your professors?

iris

Thanks to you and your associates, Mr. Takayama, I have already been dead any number of times. It changes one’s perspective.

TAKAYAMA

Ah, an excellent answer, Miss Brockman.

Or even further and odder the moment where Iris gazes on the petrification device provided by Takayama’s mysterious and somewhat sinister organization and contemplates something awful — to most people.

Iris picks up the camera-petrifying device, which is sitting on her desk, and looks into its business end.

IRIS

(to herself)

It has its appeal, doesn’t it?

But it must be said that even these strange and disturbing thoughts have some sort of science-fiction antecedent.

(My source for this image is the blog Posthuman Blues.) If that isn’t as mad-science as it gets,  I’ll eat my rheostat.  I don’t know much about the story, although the Wikipedia entry on author Paul W. Fairman indicates that the story “The Girl who Loved Death” was published in 1952.  Casual nosing around hasn’t yet turned up a copy of the text of the story (did nobody ever love it? — the closest thing to a review I was able to find wasn’t terribly positive) but the cover itself surely speaks volumes.

The 1950s were supposedly a bland and conformist decade, the time of Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet, but looking more carefully one finds some very strange stuff back there.