In Paris in 1845, Pierre Dupin and his roommate Paul,
accompanied by their respective girl friends, Camille L'Espanaye and
Mignette, attend a carnival. They enter the tent of Doctor
Mirakle, who claims he is a scientist and exhibits "Erik," his pet
ape, to illustrate a lecture on evolution—proof
of which can be found, he claims, by mixing the blood of a man and
an ape.
Believing Erik is attracted to Camille, Mirakle
orders his servant Janos, The Black One, to follow her home and
obtain her address. Later that night, after witnessing a
violent quarrel between two men that ends in their deaths, Mirakle
takes the woman of the street the men were fighting over into his
carriage. In his laboratory, Mirakle extracts a specimen of
the woman's blood, only to discover it is tainted, and the woman
dies screaming on the rack. Mirakle disposes of her body in
the river, and she becomes the third such victim to be discovered
there in a week.
Pierre, a medical student, bribes the Morgue Keeper
for a sample of the woman's blood, and discovers that all three
women died as a result of a foreign substance being injected into
their blood. When Camille then receives a bonnet from Mirakle
with a note attached asking her to return to the carnival tent,
Pierre convinces her that Mirakle could be dangerous. Going in
Camille's place, Pierre finds Mirakle uncommunicative about his
experiments and secretly follows him to the lab.
Later that evening, Mirakle observes Pierre leave
Camille and, when he is unable to persuade her to accompany him,
Mirakle orders Erik to abduct her. Meanwhile, Pierre deduces
that the victims died from injections of ape blood and runs to
Camille. Arriving too late, Pierre is detained by the police
until he finds Camille's mother, Mme. L'Espanaye, strangled and
stuffed up the chimney by the ape. The gendarmes follow Pierre
to Mirakle's lab, where Erik's blood is about to be mixed into
Camille's veins. The gendarmes then shoot Janos while Erik
kills Mirakle. Erik climbs onto the rooftops, carrying Camille
with him. Pierre ascends after Erik and, shooting him, rescues
Camille, while Mirakle ends up as one more body in the morgue.
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