The Killer Gorilla: The Role of the Ape in Popular Culture (Part 2)

                                                                              

Six years after Edgar Alan Poe introduced us to his killer orang-utan in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), a new species of great ape was discovered in the wilds of Africa that captured the public imagination. Bigger than the other anthropoid apes, and roughly three times heavier than the average human, the discovery of Troglodytes gorilla in 1847 re-enforced the idea of the killer ape in the public imagination. After Charles Darwin published his On the Origins of Species in 1859, this human like beast took on a new identity that surpassed its reputation as animal imitator of humanity, that of  the missing link to our simian ancestry, our wild animal cousin . No longer just the companion of showmen and clowns, the ape was quickly becoming the hairy henchmen and guinea pig of the mad scientist wanting to explore evolution’s wonders.

It wasn’t long before the evolutionary link infiltrated the great ape’s carnival attraction persona. In the 1880’s the magician Herbert Albini, aka Albini the Great, invented the popular sideshow illusion Girl to Gorilla in which a beautiful girl in a cage appears to transform into a savage gorilla before the eyes of the audience. Following the classic mirror illusion, a man in a gorilla suit would proceed to break out of the enclosure and chase the audience from the tent. Not only could apes be seen at the zoo or entertaining at the circus, now one could also witness the horror of evolution take place in reverse. A classic of sideshow alley, the trick can still be found in carnivals around the world. It wasn’t long before the popularity of the gorilla, and the availability of gorilla suits, saw the figure of the  ape appear in various stage productions around the world.

During the twenties the Old Dark House genre of drama was popular. Typically a mixture of people would assemble in an old house, complete with secret doors, often for an official reason, (e.g., the reading of a will) after which a murder or murders would begin to take place. Frequently something unusual present in the house would be blamed for the murders until the real identity of the murderer would be revealed. In 1924 Adam Shirk wrote the play The Ape in which a group of investors in an archaeological expedition assemble in an old house to confront a long missing archaeologist about their share of the recovered treasure. Once in the house it seems as though they are caught up in an oriental curse placed on the treasure and executed by a sacred ape.  A year later Ralph Spence wrote The Gorilla, in which the an escaped gorilla enters an old dark house in which the reading of a will is about to take place. Coincidentally, the animal's presence confuses the issue, when investigators arrive seeking to capture a murderer rumored to be targeting the gathering also known as the Gorilla. In 1927 The Gorilla was adapted to the silent screen and the killer gorilla was on its way to finding a place in cinema’s gallery of ghouls and haunted house and ghost train sideshows around the world.

With the advent of sound, both plays were adapted for the screen, The Gorilla again in 1930  and once more 1939 featuring the Ritz Brothers. In 1934 The Ape was filmed as The House of Mystery  and loosely adapted as The Ape starring Boris Karloff and adapted by Curt Siodmak in 1940. Following in the footsteps of these productions was The Monster Walks (1932) another old dark house story which again saw the blame for various murders following the reading of a will wrongly leveled at a lab chimp caged in the basement. The human-likeness of the gorilla makes the primate a perfect fall guy for human murderers that hope the brutality of their actions will be blamed on the innocent brute.

In 1932, Universal released the first cinema adaptation of Murders in the Rue Morgue which broadened the bounds of the original story and  introduced a new scientific element. The film version told the story of a Doctor Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) who has learnt to speak the language of his trained gorilla, Eric (Charles Gamora) and who seeks to find a human female with a compatible blood type so he can create a suitable mate for Eric. After several candidates have been found incompatible and discarded, a suitable candidate is found in Camille (Sidney Fox), the girl friend of Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames), the detective hero of Poe's original story. After the kidnapping of Camille from her apartment by Eric results in the murder of her mother (Betty Ross Clarke), Mirakle and the ape are soon tracked down to the laboratory located in the Rue Morgue, where the heroine is saved, the villain strangled by the ape and the gorilla shot.

Here we have an interesting development in the idea of the killer gorilla, that is the ape as the raw material of human life. No longer did would-be-Frankensteins need body parts to create monsters, now they could go right to the source of human life and harness the power of evolution, to evolve apes into human monsters or devolve humans back to there primordial selves. As the Girl to Gorilla side show suggested, the harnessing of evolution could create true horrors. Now the gorilla was not just the denizen of the side show and the old dark house but that of the mad scientists lab as well. Interestingly the last scene of Morgue featured a trope that would be made famous by a film  released the following year, that of the ape carrying it's the intended human mate up to the roof tops only to be shot down for the brazen, forbidden act of inter-species (possibly read interracial) romance.

As the 30's progressed, the popularity of the killer gorilla went from strength to strength. This was in the main due to the release of the two special effects extravaganzas, King Kong (1933) and Son of Kong (1933), which figuratively and literary took the idea of the Killer Ape to new heights.

To be continued...