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 (1932 film) romantic subplots. The film premiered on February 21, 1932 in the US and was later re-release on April 15, 1949 according to IMDb. All in all, Murders in the Rue Morgue received quite mixed reviews. In an issue of Photoplay Magazine from 1932, it was written that the critic "shook and shuddered when (they) saw this picture and so will you." Because of the increasing popularity of horror films due to the success of Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), there was a lot of hype surrounding the release of this film. N.Y. Daily News writes that Murders in the Rue