composed this repugnant poem and distributed it to friends and family (p. 509):


On the Creation of Niggers


When, long ago, the Gods created Earth In Jove’s fair image Man was shap’d at birth. The beasts for lesser parts were next design’d; Yet were they too remote from humankind. To fill this gap, and join the rest to man, Th’ Olympian host conceiv’d a clever plan. A beast they wrought, in semi-human figure. Fill’d it with vice, and call’d the thing a nigger. (Lovecraft, THE ANCIENT TRACK, p. 393)


It’s easy to see how the man who wrote this poem, if given the news that he was secretly related to a lost tribe of half-human primates in deepest, dark- est Africa, might resort to self-immolation rather than deal with the revelation. In his version of MURDERS IN THE RUE


MORGUE, as stated before, Florey often blurs the line between animal and human. Mirakle, however, seems very clear on where the line ends: It doesn’t. Mirakle continually insists that Erik has not just been trained to act like a human, he is human. At the very beginning of his presentation, Mirakle says, “I’m not exhibiting a freak or a mon- strosity of nature, but a milestone in the develop- ment of science. The shadow of Erik the Ape hangs over us all—the dark before the Dawn of Man.” At which point, Mirakle unveils Erik for the first time. This last line, coupled with Lugosi’s venomous delivery, gives the impression that Mirakle is being somewhat sarcastic when he refers to Erik as “the dark before the Dawn of Man.” Mirakle doesn’t consider the birth of mankind to have been the dawn of anything; it’s clear that Mirakle has little use for mankind, except as experimental subjects to prove that humans are no better than animals. (His theatrical moniker, Mirakle, seems laden with sarcasm as well. A modern equivalent would be a biologist like Stephen Jay Gould touring the Ameri- can South giving lectures about evolution under the name “Dr. Kreation.”)


When Erik is visibly pleased by the nearness of Camille to his cage, Mirakle says, “Erik is only hu- man, Mademoiselle. He has an eye for beauty!” The phrase “only human” again suggests that Mirakle does not hold humanity in high regard, though sometimes Mirakle does find use for “beauty,” if only temporarily, until beauty expires prematurely. Later in the film, Mirakle tracks Camille to the apartment that she shares with her mother. After Camille refuses to be lured into Mirakle’s coach,


26


the good doctor sends Erik the Ape into Camille’s bedroom to kidnap her. The kidnapping is inter- rupted, however, by Camille’s hysterical mother, Madame L’Espanaye (Betty Ross Clarke). What happens next is one of those rare moments when studio interference can make a scene more daring and suggestive than originally intended. According to the authors of the encyclopedic


book UNIVERSAL HORRORS: THE STUDIO’S CLAS- SIC FILMS, 1931-1946: “Upon the film’s comple- tion, Carl Laemmle, Jr., ordered reshoots of several key scenes. In a bid to add to the realism of Erik’s scenes, close-ups of an actual monkey, filmed at a zoo, were none-too-artfully edited into the final prints” (p. 52). Bob Burns, an expert in the history of cinematic horror, spoke to the authors of UNIVER- SAL HORRORS about his 1957 meeting with Charles Gemora, the actor who portrayed Erik the Ape: “[T]he thing about MURDERS IN THE RUE


MORGUE that stuck in Charlie’s craw a little was the fact that close-ups of an actual chimp were inserted into the movie instead of the close-ups they’d shot of Charlie in his gorilla suit. When he saw the movie, he said he was in shock because the movie would, all of a sudden, jump from a shot of him in his gorilla suit to a shot of that very different-looking chimp. He wasn’t too pleased with that, and could never figure out why they did it. His gorilla face was perfectly mobile, it could do the expressions that were needed.” (p. 53) The ironic result of this tampering on the part of the studio, which was apparently done against Florey’s wishes, was that it lent a perverse twist to the murder of Camille’s mother. Due to the com- bination of the angle of the camera, the chimp’s frenetic motions, and the actress’ high-pitched screams, it appears as if Erik the Ape is raping Camille’s mother rather than just beating her to death as originally intended. The studio balked at having Mirakle state that he intended on mating an ape with a woman, but then altered the film after the fact by inserting shots that actually seem to show the very act the studio heads didn’t want Lugosi to mention in a mere sentence. At the end of the film, Erik the Ape turns against Dr. Mirakle—which is exactly how James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN ended a year earlier. It could be that this element was a direct carry-over from Florey’s adaptation of Shelley’s novel. In Bryan Senn’s 1996 book GOLDEN HORRORS: AN ILLUS- TRATED CRITICAL FILMOGRAPHY, 1931-1939, Florey is quoted as saying “I wrote the RUE MORGUE adaptation in a week and directed the film in four. That was during the fall of 1931. In RUE MORGUE, I used the same device I employed

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