7. Murders In The Rue Morgue
1932
The commingling of ape and human was all the rage in the early 1930s. Fed by ethnographic documentaries and newsreels about safaris in Africa and Asia, audiences just couldn’t get enough of seeing muscular, usually aggressive simians on the silver screen. Given this and the horror boom that came in the wake of the combined success of Universal’s Dracula andFrankenstein (both released in 1931), it’s no surprise that monster movies would explicitly feature gorillas, chimpanzees, and the occasional orangutan as villains. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), which stars Bela Lugosi as the mad scientist Dr. Mirakle, is a film that does just that.
Loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story of the same name, Murders in the Rue Morgue places Dr. Mirakle in the role of an extreme proponent of Darwinian evolution, whose “great experiment” is intended to once and for all prove humanity’s “kinship with the ape.” Mirakle’s experiment involves using a syringe to inject ape blood into the veins of his captured victims. At first, Dr. Mirakle uses a prostitute before deciding to search for a virgin woman in order to somehow create a half-human, half-ape bride for his own ape, Erik. Like his earlier turn as Count Dracula, Lugosi’s Mirakle is a sort of sexual deviant who relies upon blood transfusions in order to achieve his ends. In other instances, Dr. Mirakle engages in senseless acts of violenceand even moments of sacrilege, such as the near-crucifixion and implied worship of a dead streetwalker.
In 1932, such stuff was considered too hot for younger audiences, and theWashington Post chided the film as a tribute to “mass morbidity” and an appeal to perverts. Censors took their scissors to the film as well, reducing the run time to a single hour in order to get rid of the initial cut’s more provocative scenes.
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