The plot is about Doctor Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), a carnival sideshow entertainer and scientist who kidnaps Parisian women to mix their blood with that of his gorilla, Erik.

Mirakle restrains Erik and offers to replace the bonnet but Camille is suspicious and is reluctant to give the doctor her address.

A police prefect interviews three witnesses: Italian Alberto Montani, German Franz Odenheimer and a Danish man, all of whom state they heard Camille screaming and someone else talking in a foreign language.

Camille's mother is found dead; her body is stuffed into a chimney and her hand is clutching ape fur, from which Pierre deduces Erik may be involved.

[4] Bette Davis was auditioned for the part of Camille; according to Florey, Carl Laemmle Jr. rejected her due to "a lack of sex appeal".

[12] The Hollywood Reporter wrote about a preview screening on January 6, 1932, stating the film "gave Santa Ana a perfectly delightful scare and a sleepless night", calling Robert Florey as a "smart choice" for director and saying Sidney Fox is "nice in appearance".

The reviewer also said Lugosi "has the physical necessities and is so legitimately trained that even though his performance does smack of the old legit, he is perfection in a role of this sort.

[2][3] Censor boards in the United States abbreviated scenes showing the death of the prostitute and removed shots of her being stabbed and of her tied up in a laboratory.

[15] After playing in Los Angeles, Murders in the Rue Morgue continued to be run in theaters, leading to more theatrical re-issues by Realart Pictures towards the end of the 1940s.

[19] Eureka Entertainment released the film on Blu-ray in July 2020, in a set called Three Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations Starring Bela Lugosi, which also includes The Black Cat and The Raven, as part of their Masters of Cinema collection.

[6] Among contemporaneous reviews, Andre Sennwald of The New York Times said the film suffers from "an overzealous effort at terrorization" and that the cast were overacting.

[23] Variety called the film "sexed up to the limit" as "Sidney Fox overdraws the sweet ingenue to the point of nearly distracting any audience from any fear it may have for her".

[23] Kate Cameron of the New York Daily News said the film is an "artificial screen story" and praised the ending sequence.

[23] From retrospective reviews, Patrick Legare of AllMovie rated Murders in the Rue Morgue with four stars out of five, praising Lugosi's acting, Freund's cinematography, and Florey's direction while finding the script and the rest of the cast and characters weak.

[6][23] Glenn Erickson of DVD Talk called the film a "hugely enjoyable mess" that is "often derided for its awkward acting and logic-challenged story".

[9] Florey left Universal after the film's release and signed to Warner Bros., where he maintained a four-or-five pictures a year work flow.

[12] Florey made only one more feature-length horror film, The Beast With Five Fingers (1946), which also features Caligari-like shadows and dark figures.

[23] Leon Ames also disliked Murders in the Rue Morgue, saying in an interview in Famous Monsters of Filmland it is "a perfectly awful film which still pops up on TV to haunt me".

[9] Lugosi starred in several more putative adaptations of Poe's oeuvre, including The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935), in which he again played scientists.

[30] Lugosi also appeared in other Poe-related works outside of film, such as an adaptation of "The Cask of Amontillado" for the television series Suspense and a radio performance of Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".