Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932 film) Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932 film) Murders in the Rue Morgue is a 1932 American pre-Code horror film, very loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Bela Lugosi, one year after his performance as Dracula, portrays a lunatic scientist who abducts women and injects them with blood from his ill-tempered caged ape. Karl Freund's cinematography and Robert Florey's direction have been praised by critics and characterized as "expressionistic" by Leonard Maltin. Despite the film being pre-Code, violent sequences prompted Universal to cut its running time from 80 minutes to 61 minutes. This
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971 film) hired to direct the film. Hessler says he felt the story was so familiar it needed to be changed, so he and writer Christopher Wicking decided to do it as a play-within-a-play, with a mystery happening around a theatre that was putting on a production of "Murder in the Rue Morgue". The new storyline owned a lot to "Phantom of the Opera". Hessler said Vincent Price "was very upset that he wasn't in" the film "but I had nothing to with that." He thought Price was having contractual fights with AIP at the time. Hessler says AIP hired Jason Robard