Ten Days of Terror!: Murders in the Rue Morgue

Film: Murders in the Rue Morgue
Format: Internet video on Fire!

When a novel is turned into a movie, most of the time, large parts of the story are removed. We lose subplots and detail simply because of time. Even larger projects do this—watch (for instance) any adaptation of Dune and we lose tons of nuance, even in the miniseries version. The reverse is true when it comes to short stories. With something like he 1932 adaptation of Murders in the Rue Morgue, a bunch gets added to the basic story. This is true even in the case where the movie just barely creeps over the hour mark.

I’m going to spoil the original story here, and I’m going to do this unapologetically—it was written more than 180 years ago. The original Edgar Allen Poe story essentially invents the modern detective tale. We’re introduced to a detective who solves a bizarre crime of terrible murders where witnesses identify the language being spoken by the perpetrator as a variety of other languages—one person thinks the killer is German, another says Italian, etc. In truth, the murders are being carried out by an orangutan.

Let Your Fingers Do the Walking

Film: The Beast with Five Fingers
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on basement television.

There’s something I love about early horror movies. They’re earnest in a way that a lot of modern horror isn’t. A lot of this seems to be because they had to work a lot harder to do what they wanted. They couldn’t show a great deal of gore, they couldn’t include language, and so they had to go for atmosphere and suggestion. I don’t want to discount modern horror, because there’s some great horror movies out there that have learned a lot of lessons from these earlier horror films as well as the modern ones. A film like The Beast with Five Finger might not work today because of how it works, but it’s a perfect testament to the way horror had to be done 70-80 years ago.

There’s a great deal of films like The Hands of Orlac in The Beast with Five Fingers, because the beast isn’t a man, but a disembodied hand. We’re going to start with a sort of conman named Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda), who is scamming tourists in Italy. It turns out that Bruce is actually a formerly respected composer whose last work was creating new pieces for Francis Ingram (Victor Francen), a respected pianist who suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side. Also living with Ingram are his nurse Julie Holden (Andrea King) and a musicologist/astrologer Hillary Cummins (Peter Lorre). Ingram, under the auspices of his attorney Duprex (David Hoffman), has everyone declare him sane, mainly so that when he dies, his new will won’t be contested.