And an early scene where he viciously tortures Arlene Francis’s prostitute equates him with the species he hopes to produce through his experiments – neither wholly human nor wholly animal but totally monstrous. Rue Morgue had obvious racial undertones too with Lugosi’s East European Dr Mirakle equated with his big horny ape Erik via their ludicrous bushy eyebrows drawing a parallel between Mirakle as an uncivilised foreigner. Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, kept Poe’s fascination with violent great apes, but the film is clearly inspired in both story and style by Robert Wiene’s 1920 classic, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari with its use of German Expressionism. In Murders in the Rue Morgue Lugosi would play a mad scientist running a twisted carnival sideshow in 19 th century Paris and murdering women to find a mate for his talking ape attraction. The three Poe films were very loose adaptations of the original stories and at best were ‘re-imaginings’ that sometimes used only the title and Poe’s name to draw in an audience.

Murders in the Rue Morgue saw Lugosi play a mad scientist running a twisted carnival sideshow in 19 th century Paris and murdering women to find a mate for his talking ape attraction. It was to become a staple of Lugosi’s career playing them in White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), The Phantom Creeps (Ford Beebe, 1939), The Devil Bat (Jean Yarbrough, 1940), The Corpse Vanishes (Wallace Fox, 1942), The Ape Man (William Beaudine, 1943) and Return of Ape Man (Phil Rosen, 1944), Voodoo Man (William Beaudine, 1944), Mother Riley Meets The Vampire (John Gilling, 1952), and Bride of the Monster (Ed Wood, 1955) most of them increasingly worse as his career went downhill. Lugosi In each of the three Universal Poe films, played a variation on the theme of the lunatic scientist. Murders in the Rue Morgue directed by Robert Florey would star Lugosi as a archetypal character type that would become a mark of his work namely the mad doctor. Universal felt they were onto a sure-fire winner with the Lugosi/ literary adaptation combo. But Poe had plenty of source material and Lugosi and his director Robert Florey who had left the Frankenstein project were keen to make Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1932. Universal studios were the home of the classic monster movies and having had huge success with Bela Lugoisi as Dracula and then Boris Karloff in Frankenstein the studio looked to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe of which a few silent films had been made with little fanfare.

Black cat in the rue morgue