Halloween season
simply isn’t Halloween season without a regular dose of classic Universal horror (1923-1963). Every day this October, I’ll be giving you a steady IV drip of it by counting down Psychobabble’s 31 Favorite Universal
Horrors!
#20. Murders in the
Rue Morgue (1932- dir. Robert Florey)
This delirious and rather perverse adaptation of Poe’s
timeless terror tale is a great opportunity to watch Bela Lugosi rant and rave
as an ape-wrangler with a perilous unibrow. His scheme to prove the theory of
evolution by injecting gorilla blood into women is insane, and if you think
about it, there are some pretty disturbing sexual implications there. Karl
Freund milks the premise for all its horror value with his Gothic,
expressionistic cinematography. And for once, the comic relief does not
completely fall flat.
