The Big Picture
1932’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaption of the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, is an overlooked but delightfully morbid entry in Universal Pictures’ early horror catalog. The film captures the essence of Poe’s psychologically terrifying work and boasts visuals inspired by the German Expressionist movement. Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of the villainous Doctor Mirakle is so unsettling, the film was censored due to a disturbing torture scene involving his character.
In 1932, roughly a year after his Dracula hit theaters, Bela Lugosi headlined Universal Pictures’ short horror film Murders in the Rue Morgue. Based on the same Edgar Allan Poe story Mike Flanagan incorporated into his Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher, this 91-year-old film still makes for a delightfully grim, nasty watch. Content-wise, Flanagan adapts the heart of Poe’s tale more faithfully; Universal’s Murders in the Rue Morgue bears little resemblance to the original plot except for (spoiler) the gorilla-as-murderer reveal. It’s a shame for a story often considered the first detective story — and its protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, the inspiration for more famous figures like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot — to lose its central identity in what remains Rue Morgue’s only Hollywood adaptation. Nevertheless, Murders in the Rue Morgue is a delightfully morbid and woefully overlooked entry in Universal’s pre-Hays Code catalog. It’s flagrantly provocative and perverse, playing with violence, sexuality, and religious norms, and director Robert Florey and cinematographer Karl W. Freund based the movie’s style on the German Expressionism movement. Murders in the Rue Morgue also captures the most essential component of any Poe tale: inescapable psychological terror. American censors banned a shockingly violent scene featuring Lugosi’s villain.
What Is ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’ About?
In 1840s Paris, Doctor Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) is a carnival entertainer by day and a classic “mad” scientist by night if there ever was one. When he isn’t charming carnival attendees, he prowls the Parisian streets in a sweeping dark cloak, kidnapping women and using them as test subjects for his experiment mixing human and gorilla blood. Ostensibly, it’s to prove that humans evolved from apes. The implication too inflammatory for even a film as daring as Murders in the Rue Morgue is that if Mirakle succeeds, then Erik, his gorilla companion, can have a proto-The Bride of Frankenstein girlfriend. (Sure, why not.) Once the dead bodies of beautiful women inexplicably pile up, Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames), a distractible and lackadaisical medical student, takes notice. He especially takes notice once Mirakle and Erik set their admiring sights on Pierre’s fiancée, Camille L’Espanye (Sidney Fox).
For Murders in the Rue Morgue, prolific Daughter of Shanghai director Robert Florey and Metropolis, Dracula, and Key Largo cinematographer Karl W. Freund recreated 19th century Paris through hand-built sets and matte paintings. The canted camera angles frame the already angular buildings in hauntingly unrealistic ways. Freund’s lighting pulls from his experience on Dracula and Metropolis as much as director Robert Wiene and cinematographer Willy Hameister’s 1920 horror masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a leading example of German Expressionism. The shadows drape and envelope, making Paris look like a beautiful yet imposing fairy tale illustration. This is no city of love despite the romance between Pierre and Camille. Florey and Freund’s Paris is a place of lethal debauchery; death breathes down your neck in every dark corner or quietly stalks your footsteps down a long alleyway. Even the lack of music increases this sinister aura; ambient noise and the hum of old audio recording equipment become menacing.
Bela Lugosi Terrifies His Way Through ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’
Naturally, this lurking danger is brought to life through Bela Lugosi, the obvious marquee name and Murders in the Rue Morgue’s biggest draw. Hollywood instantly and unfairly stereotyped the Hungarian-American actor upon his starring turn in director Tod Browning’s Dracula, but oh, does he play the villain well. He’s gleefully, eerily unsettling in his politest moments and mortifying when the dark recesses of night reveal the sadist lurking underneath. When Mirakle first appears during the carnival, Camille and Pierre half-titter over his looks and accent. It’s a reaction as stereotypically dated as the roles American studios offered Lugosi, yet amusing given the way Lugosi oozes “he’s cute, but I wouldn’t trust this man as far as I could throw him” charisma. The amoral scientist aims to prove that men evolved from gorillas; the crowd meets his Darwinism with derision. One man calls him a heretic, and Mirakle answers with a grin so unnaturally wide it belongs in the A Clockwork Orange aversion therapy scene. “Do they still burn men for heresy? Then burn me, monsieur,” he cheerfully goads. “Light the fire.”
Mirakle’s commitment to science is all well and good until the murder starts. Karl W. Freund’s chiaroscuro lighting cloaks Lugosi in silhouetted darkness as he stalks directly toward the camera, intent upon his victim. Mirakle leers, he preens, and he preys on vulnerable women to appease his self-aggrandizing dignity (“I am not just a sideshow charlatan”). Bela Lugosi’s automatic tendency to scenery-chew suits German Expressionism’s heightened drama. (The actor would reprise a similar role in The Black Cat, another 1930s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation that was unfaithful but appropriately moody, and Universal’s biggest hit of 1934.)
Even knowing the film predates the Hays Code and therefore had more flexibility to depict things the Code would deem inappropriate, Murders in the Rue Morgue has a startlingly bleak torture scene. After Mirakle kidnaps a nameless woman (Arlene Francis), he binds her arms crucifix-style to two wooden posts and repeatedly stabs her with a syringe full of gorilla blood, all while she screams her lungs raw. Towering over her within kissing distance, he yells at her to be quiet. He yells more when his experiment to combine gorilla and human blood fails once again. Mirakle blames the innocent woman, furiously calling her “rotten blood” as “black as your sins.” Then, he has the gall to act surprised and distressed when she dies in front of him. All this happens within a single take, the camera tracking Mirakle’s movements. “Will my search ever end?” he opines, disheveled hair and rumpled shirt speaking to his despair. In a final dehumanizing act, Mirakle orders his assistant to dispose of “it.” This mad scientist is capable of callous, impatient cruelty followed by prayerful, tormented regret. He’s scarier than Dracula because he’s just as deadly, but a frenzied mess compared to the Count’s easy calm.
American Censors Didn’t Approve of Bela Lugosi’s Character in ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’
Image via Universal Pictures
American censors disliked many aspects of Murders of the Rue Morgue. Sequences of suggestive dancing and Mirakle’s allusions to evolution were cut, but the torture scene drew the most ire. Not only did they entirely remove Mirakle stabbing the woman and any suggestion of her tied-up pose on the posts (which makes up most of the scene), the censor boards objected to the volume of the victim’s screams. According to the AFI Catalog, which quotes a letter from the Director of the Studio Relations Office of the AMPPA: “Because the victim is a woman in this instance, which has not heretofore been the case in other so-called “horror” pictures recently produced, censor boards are very likely to think that this scene is overdone in gruesomeness. We therefore suggest that you ought to consider…reducing the constant loud shrieking to lower moans and an occasional modified shriek.” Even though films have depicted similar scenes of a more explicit nature, there’s something utterly chilling about the combination of Bela Lugosi’s vicious energy, the pitch of actress Arlene Francis’ screams, and the sheer simplicity of a man torturing a human being — a woman — he doesn’t view as a person, all in the name of personal advancement.
Sadly, in comparison to Lugosi as antagonist, Pierre Dupin — standing in for C. Auguste Dupin — makes for a dull hero. One of Murders in the Rue Morgue’s concessions to the original story is Dupin trying to solve the crimes. A medical student and amateur investigator, Pierre is creepily fixated on finding the murderer, ignoring his studies and performing an unauthorized autopsy on a victim’s naked body. His roommate bewails how Dupin is turning their shared residence into a morgue and equates him to a “vampire.” Camille fares little better as a character, existing mostly to scream and be kidnapped. At least she shuts the door in Mirakle’s face, but Erik dragging her around the Paris rooftops after he absconds with her is no fun for anyone. It makes one long for Kate Siegel and her marvelous white wig.
Portions of Murders in the Rue Morgue drag. The “man in a gorilla suit” effects don’t hold up, and calling the subtext uncomfortable when closely examined is putting things lightly. Still, the movie is more than the sum of its parts and deserves recognition for its place in the Universal horror lexicon. In a comprehensive essay covering the film’s production originally published in a 1987 issue of American Cinematographer, Brian Taves observed that “few Hollywood films have been so thoroughly dominated by the Germanic style in conception and treatment, from narrative to set design to photography. The key reason was that the film was made by a team unique for their immersion in the expressionist tradition — Florey and cinematographer Freund.” Clocking in at one hour exactly, Murders in the Rue Morgue is a quick and extremely rewarding watch for anyone interested in pre-Code horror, film adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, and stories with ties to Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher. Who are we to argue with the Criterion Channel?
Murders in the Rue Morgue is available to stream on the Criterion Channel.