Murders in the Rue Morgue

One of the most unheralded of Universal’s 1930s horror films, though perhaps the purest example of the form during that era, Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) comes off as early-Hollywood torture porn by way of German Expressionism. It was shot by Karl Freund, the pioneering cinematographer responsible for lensing several early Fritz Lang films, including Metropolis. For Universal, he also shot Tod Browning’s Dracula, then made his directorial debut with The Mummy in the same year that he worked on Murders in the Rue Morgue. Though the latter’s director, Robert Florey, went on to helm some star-studded pre-Code zingers outside the horror genre, this was the film that put him on the map (after he had been let go from Frankenstein and James Whale took over).

This very loose Poe adaptation, a quite absurd but totally transfixing mad-scientist yarn with beautiful period sets (the action takes place in Paris, 1845), has got style to spare, and its first kill scene (set to rolling fog and streetlamps) is to die for. The film’s villain, Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), a monster only in the figurative sense (and reminiscent of Dr. Caligari), is a menacing delight, with an impressively bushy unibrow to match his curly head of hair. Compounding his bizarre persona, he speaks in an unidentifiable accent that sounds something like French Dracula. The sideshow attraction he runs at the local carnival features a humanlike ape, Erik, who grunts in an unintelligible language, translated by his keeper. For Mirakle’s “evolution studies,” the doctor seeks a mate for Erik, injecting women with ape blood, though he’s had little luck with the experiment so far (hence the morgue of the title). His laboratory is full of cool-looking equipment, and the large X-shaped contraption on which he binds his women subjects/victims is both creepy and cinematic as hell. The film is so gruesome that it was trimmed by the censors.

When Mirakle finds the perfect specimen in Camille (the lovely Sidney Fox, whose life and career were too short-lived—she OD’d on sleeping pills a decade later), his usual abduction doesn’t go as smoothly due to her feisty resistance and her loyal medical student/amateur-detective boyfriend, Pierre (Leon Ames), hot on the doctor’s diabolical trail. But the ape is smitten with Camille as well, and there’s a rooftop finale reminiscent of King Kong’s Empire State Building scene (which it preceded by a year). Murders in the Rue Morgue may have been a troubled production that was greeted mostly with derision, but the film looks pretty damn crisp today, offering an impressive number of bloodcurdling screams in 62 minutes that breeze by in a flash. 🩸