When you think ‘master criminal’, a few names immediately come to mind: Sherlock Holmes’s evil genius Professor Moriarity, the insidious Dr Fu Manchu, Superman’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor. But one name that should probably top any such list is that of Dr Mabuse. Mabuse was the brain child of the Luxembourg-born German writer Norbert Jacques, and when he appeared in Norbert’s 1921 novel Dr Mabuse der Spieler (Dr Mabuse the Gambler), first in a news­paper serial, then as a book, he created a sens­ation. The key to the novel’s popularity was that it struck the contemporary nerve dead centre. The Germany that thrilled to Mabuse’s evil exploits, secretly manipulating a frenetic financial system and feeding off the decad­ent rich, was itself reeling from an economic and social whirlwind that makes our own credit crunch look like a minor hiccup. The combination of sens­ationalism and social comment­ary brought the book to director Fritz Lang’s attention.

Lang is best known for his dystopia Metropolis (1927) and the pædophilic M (1931), and for his hard-boiled Hollywood noir classics like Manhunt (1941) and Scarlet Street (1945), but in the Mabuse trilogy collected in this handsome set, Lang found perhaps the most successful vehicle for his central concern: combining popular genre narrative with social critique. The result was three masterpieces of philo­sophical sensationalism, blending cultural analysis with edge-of-the-seat suspense. Mabuse must have meant something special to Lang, as his obsession with the character spanned his career. The first film of the trilogy, Dr Mabuse der Spieler – a four-hour-long, two part silent epic originally designed to show on separate evenings – was made in 1922. The third, Lang’s last film, Die 1000 Augen des Dr Mabuse (The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse) appeared in 1960, and is more than halfway to a Bond adventure. Sandwiched between the two is perhaps the most impressive of the series, the early talkie Das Testament des Dr Mabuse (The Testament of Dr Mabuse, 1933), a thinly veiled attack on the Nazi rise to power; so thinly veiled, in fact, that Goebbels banned the film and it wasn’t shown in Germany until 1951. Legend has it that when Goebbels called Lang into his office to tell him the bad news, he intimated that Hitler was so impressed with his work that he wanted him to be the official auteur for the Reich. Lang was so chilled at the offer that he’s said to have hightailed it to Hollywood that night.

Lang was adept at combining the eerie atmosphere of German Expressionist classics with the pulse-pounding tension of adventure serials, and nowhere is this more evident than in his Mabuse films. Anyone familiar with Lang’s work will find all the fixings here – fantastic lighting, uncanny angles, vivid contrasts, an exterior world mirroring the interior one – and the snobbish among us can ignore the thrills while appreciating the art. But that would be missing the point. Lang refused to accept the high/pop culture divide, and argued that one could dissect society’s ills, and create serious cinematic art, while simultaneously telling a ripping yarn. Sadly, art and popular cinema have since sett­led into mutually exclusive ruts, located in Europe and Hollywood. But then, Lang had genius.

So did Dr Mabuse, who first appears as an invisible Mr Big, a master of disguise controlling the rollercoaster economy of a failing Weimar Republic, and whose arsenal of nefarious powers includes an irresistible command of hypnosis, fuelled by an indomit­able will. Mabuse’s shifting identities mirror the uncertainty of the time, and the decline of the West becomes the backdrop to super-crime. Only Mabuse’s self-destructive urges finally bring about his downfall, when the army attacks his fortified stronghold. At the end of the first film, Mabuse goes mad and languishes in an asylum, but he returns in Testament, when his spirit finds a suitable dwelling in the cranium of the doctor studying him. Mabuse’s physical form eventually dies, but even beyond the grave, his lust for destruction and chaos continues, and the scene in which an astral Mabuse, complete with exposed brain (a result of his doctor’s attempt to locate its ‘evil’ part) and bulging insect eyes, lectures his host on his plans for an ‘empire of crime’ must rank as one of the most unsettling in film. Here, Mabuse is, as Lang called him, ‘evil incarn­ate’. He’s not, like some other mad geniuses, interested in anything as paltry as ruling the world. Mabuse wants to lay waste to civilisation, to create a landscape of terror and ruin, on which he will feed like some unspeakable parasite. You could call him a career nihilist.

By the last film (of Lang’s – Mabuse became a franchise in Germany, much like Fu Manchu in the UK, and several more entries were made in the 1960s and ’70s), Mabuse has become a kind of disembodied focus for modern angst, finding another welcome host in yet another accommodating doctor. If the Mabuse of The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse is less demonic than that of Testament, he is perhaps more insidiously close to our own concerns. Setting up camp in the Hotel Luxor – built by the Nazis as a kind of five star Panopticon – the new Mabuse uses a battery of secret surveillance cameras to keep his 1,000 eyes trained on the guests’ every move. The whole film is about watching, either through hidden tele­vision cameras or secret one-way mirr­ors, or through the uncanny precognition of the blind psychic Dr Cornelius. The fact that he is a doctor should be a dead giveaway, and here, as in the other films, Lang sweetens his dark paranoia with some occult sugar, throwing an astrological insurance salesman into the mix. But is he a salesman? And is Cornelius really psychic? You’ll have to watch to find out.

The special features, original art work, and essays by and interviews with Lang make this an attractive package, even at the price, and the themes of economic collapse, terrorism, and the surveillance society make the films uncomfortably relevant. But the sheer power of Lang’s Mabuse is compelling enough.