Abstract
Universal Picture’s precode 1932 horror-film classic Murders in the Rue Morgue is a less-than-faithful adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story of the same name. Although the film strays far from its source material, nods to its origin remain, most notably in the racially coded figure of the ape-man, a trope that mutates in form but ultimately survives the transition from nineteenth-century story to twentieth-century film. Universal’s film adaptation appropriates and revises nineteenth-century constructions of scientific racism, speciation, and miscegenation as a means of entering into racially charged 1930s discourses of primitivism, which frequently hinged upon a persistent fear of foreign Others. Fears over miscegenation and cross-class mobility that “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” reifies in the figure of the murderous ape resurface in discourses of primitivism well under way during the economic and cultural anxiety of the Great Depression. Public fascination with racial-ized, filmic representations of apes in studio pictures, such as King Kong (1933), and exploitation or poverty-row films, such as Ingagi (1930), was very similar to the lure that mid-nineteenth-century depictions held for their audiences. Poe holds a particular draw for the United States as a nation engaged in a continual process of refiguring notions of race and representation, and often serves as a figure or reference point for enduring discourses about racial Others and horror. For 1930s filmmakers, invoking the spirit of Poe became a means of exploiting the profitable, taboo territory of miscegenation through symbolic representations. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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