Igor - Character

Igor Manic or Ygor is the traditional stock character or cliché hunch-backed assistant or butler to many types of villain, such as Count Dracula or a mad scientist, familiar from many horror movies and horror movie parodies, the Frankenstein series and Van Helsing films in particular.

An early representation in film is Dwight Frye's original hunch-backed lab assistant in the first film of the Frankenstein series (1931), though this character was actually named "Fritz". The sequels Son of Frankenstein (1939) and The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942) featured a character named "Ygor", played by Bela Lugosi; this character, however, is neither a hunchback nor a lab assistant, but an insane broken-necked blacksmith who reanimates the Monster as an instrument of vengeance against the townspeople who attempted to hang him for graverobbing. In the 1933 horror classic Mystery of the Wax Museum "Ivan Igor" is the name of the mad wax museum curator. The film was remade as House of Wax in 1953 but interestingly the name "Igor" was given to a henchman of the curator (played by a young Charles Bronson) rather than the curator himself. While not a hunchback, the "Igor" character in House of Wax is deaf and mute and is portrayed as an unconditionally devoted servant.

Mel Brooks's parody Young Frankenstein (1974) put a comic spin on the hunchbacked assistant as "Eye-gor". In 2004 Igor returned to the screen in Universal Studios' big-budget monster movie Van Helsing.

(wikipedia)