The films in question are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935) and all three were made before the Production Code censoring of content in American movies really started to bite, and all include sequences and ideas that must have really wound up the self-styled moralists who wanted such films hidden from public gaze. All three star Bela Lugosi and two of them also feature fellow horror icon Boris Karloff, who is always credited above his co-star and was paid considerably more, the reasons for which are speculated on by more than one person in the plentiful special features.

The three features here, made by Universal between 19 as part of its classic horror cycle, are all nominally inspired by Poe stories, but while they’re happy to trade on the name recognition of the titles, only one of them even pays lip service to the text on which it is supposedly based. This is probably why some of the more faithful adaptations of his work tend to be found in short films and in segments of portmanteau features, with feature adaptations tending to expand considerably on his words or use them as jumping-off points for their own stories, none of which is a problem if it’s done with the right degree of mystery and imagination. Even back in the early 1930s at the dawn of both the sound era and the American mainstream horror movie, when a feature film could run for just a whisper over an hour without complaints of being short-changed from the audience, there was just not enough of the right sort of plot or the expected range of characters in Poe’s more popular stories to satisfy the demands of a Hollywood commercial feature. While this may be fine for the reader, it presents a challenge for any screenwriter looking to fill a feature film running time with what may take less than 30 leisurely minutes to read. Part of the problem lies in Poe’s preference for short stories over novels, tales that could be read in a single sitting rather than over the course of several days. When it comes to horror cinema, the writings of celebrated author Edgar Allan Poe have proved to be both hugely influential and, a tad paradoxically, notoriously difficult to faithfully adapt into films. Slarek hangs out with black cats, ravens and murderous gorillas.

Three classic Universal horror films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe and starring Bela Lugosi – THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, THE BLACK CAT and THE RAVEN – have been released on Blu-ray in a superb Masters of Cinema set.

Black cat in the rue morgue