Corman’s rewarding screen romance with Edgar Allan Poe continued with The Premature Burial (1962), Tales of Terror (1962), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and Tomb of Ligeia (1964). Vincent Price starred in all the films except The Premature Burial, which was headlined by Ray Milland.

Barbara Steele as Elizabeth Medina

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UNIVERSAL PICTURES, 1932

Murders in the Rue Morgue is based on one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories that had a more or less conventional, police-procedural framework and therefore didn’t require a story and characters made up of whole cloth, like so many films based on Poe. Nonetheless, many Hollywood liberties were taken, but in this case they are more enjoyable than distracting. Director Robert Florey was assigned to the film after losing Frankenstein to James Whale, and it clearly reflects his ambitious expressionist intentions for that film. Murders in the Rue Morgue may, in fact, be one of Hollywood’s purest homages to German expressionism, visually and thematically. The script veers considerably away from Poe with its lurid story of Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), a sideshow mountebank who exhibits a “human” ape named Erik but behind the scenes is carrying out a murderous scheme to mix Erik’s blood with that of a woman.

Bela Lugosi and Arlene Francis in Murders in the Rue Morgue

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MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE