The Devil Bat (1940)
Passed over for a share of the profits at the cosmetics firm he serves, small-town chemist Dr. Carruthers breeds giant bats and trains them to kill anyone wearing a new aftershave he presses on the family that wronged him. A wisecracking reporter and his photographer arrive to chase the string of throat-torn corpses.
The first and best-known horror picture from PRC, cheapest of the Poverty Row studios, and a reliable Bela Lugosi showcase in which he plays wounded dignity and homicidal glee in the same breath. The Devil Bat has been in the public domain for decades and turns up in countless budget horror collections.
Background
The Devil Bat was produced by PRC, generally considered the cheapest and least prestigious of the so-called Poverty Row studios that made low-budget genre pictures in the 1930s and 1940s, and it is widely regarded as the studio’s best-known horror production. Bela Lugosi plays a small-town chemist passed over for a fair share of profits at the cosmetics company he has long served, who takes revenge by breeding oversized bats and training them to attack anyone wearing a new aftershave he has given, as a gift, to the family that wronged him.
What to watch for
Watch for Lugosi’s performance, which moves between wounded professional dignity and quiet, homicidal glee, a combination he brought to several similar low-budget horror roles during this period of his career after his Dracula-era stardom had faded. The film has been in the public domain for decades and turns up regularly in budget horror film collections and compilations, which is often how modern audiences first encounter it.
