VOTING CLOSED – WINNER: MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE
Thanks to everyone who voted!
The roots of horror run deep. As the 2014 Summer of Blood begins to wind down, I felt it only right to pay homage to those roots, going back to some of the very first movies to use the now-common tropes of body-count pictures (though not always in common ways) in a style that was deliberately conceived as “horror”, as opposed to more incidentally horror-like mysteries or crime dramas. This the period after Dracula and before the strong enforcement of the Production Code in 1934, when imaginative filmmakers of the early sound era could go crazy with all kinds of weird and warped ideas to freak the hell out of Depression-era audiences. And while they’ve largely lost that power today, there’s still a lot of charm and low-key terror to be mined from them.
Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
From IMDb: “A mad scientist seeks to mingle human blood with that of an ape, and resorts to kidnapping women for his experiments.”
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)
From IMDb: “The disappearance of people and corpses leads a reporter to a wax museum and a sinister sculptor.”
The Vampire Bat (1933)
From IMDb: “When the villagers of Klineschloss start dying of blood loss, the town fathers suspect a resurgence of vampirism.”