Stubs - The Vampire Bat

The Vampire Bat (1933) starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas. Directed by Frank Stayer. Screenplay by Edward T. Lowe. Produced by Phil Goldstone Run time: 63 minutes. Black and White. USA. Pre-code. Horror.

While most of Hollywood history revolves around the releases from the majors (MGM, Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros, Fox, Columbia, RKO), there were several smaller studios known as poverty row studio. One of those was Majestic Pictures, which was in business in the early 1930’s. Studios like Majestic were always on the look for what they hoped would be a break out film. And with The Vampire Bat they thought they had one.

To give a little background, Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray had been paired together in Warner Bros’ Dr. X (1932), a horror film directed by Michael Curtiz, and had completed work on The Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), a follow up horror film, also directed by Curtiz. The latter was a large-scale release and would have a lengthy post-production process before it was released.

Seeing an opportunity to exploit the advance press around that film, Majestic contracted Atwill and Wray and rushed into production their own horror film, The Vampire Bat. To make the film, Majestic leased the “German Village” backlot sets left over from Frankenstein (1931) and the interior sets from James Whale’s The Old Dark House (1932). There was also some location shooting at the Bronson Caves.

In addition to Atwill and Wray, Majestic also hired Melvyn Douglas, who had appeared in The Old Dark House along with Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton, and Dwight Frye, who appeared in both Frankenstein and Dracula (1931), as Renfield. His very presence gives this a Universal monster-verse vibe.

The film was made in the fall of 1932 and hit theaters on January 21, 1933.

The town council of Kleinschloss, a fictious European village, gather to discuss a series of strange deaths in the village. With the fact that they are dying of blood loss, the town fathers suspect werewolves. But the Burgermeister (Lionel Belmore), as well as most of the townspeople, fear that the killings mark the return of an outbreak of vampirism; their historical writings tell of an epidemic of death accompanied by giant bats visiting the town in 1643. However, police inspector Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) remains skeptical.

Scientist Dr. Otto von Niemann (Lionel Atwill), who cares for the victims, visits a patient who was attacked by a bat, Martha Mueller (Rita Carlisle). He is certain that she will cover. Martha is known for her apples and out of appreciation for her kindness, she is visited by a mentally challenged man named Hermann Gleib (Dwight Frye), the town simpleton, who claims he likes bats because they are "soft like cat" and "nice".

Hermann Gleib (Dwight Frye) visits Martha Mueller after she's been attacked by a bat.

Ms. Mueller asks for her crucifix and Gleib retrieves it for her. She later tells Georgina (Stella Adams), a housekeeper in von Niemann’s house, that despite the doctor’s advice, she wants the windows closed.

Kringen (George E. Stone) tells the Village fathers his story about being attacked by bats.

On the doctor's journey home, he meets Kringen (George E. Stone), one of the villagers, who claims to have been attacked by the vampire in the form of a bat. He withheld his story from the town in order to not spread fear, but Dr. von Niemann encourages Kringen to tell it. Kringen suspects that Gleib may be a vampire due to his obsession with bats. Gleib lives with bats and collects them off the street. The fact that he seems well-fed, for a man with no job, also leads others to suspect and fear him.

Scientist Dr. Otto von Niemann (Lionel Atwill) finds police inspector
Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas) with Ruth Bertin (Fay Wray).

Dr. von Niemann returns to his home and finds Karl there with Ruth Bertin (Fay Wray). Ruth works in the lab with the von Niemann and lives there with her hypochondriac aunt Gussie Schnappmann (Maude Eburne), and servants Emil Borst (Robert Frazer) and Georgiana (Stella Adams).

Ms. Mueller is killed that night, her crucifix lying on the floor next to the bed. The analyses of Dr. von Niemann and another doctor, Dr. Haupt (William Humphrey), conclude that the death is the same as all of the previous deaths – blood loss, with two punctures in the neck caused by needle-sharp teeth.

The villagers have gathered, but when Gleib appears, they part to let him go by. He enters the examination and, upon seeing Ms. Mueller dead, runs away screaming.

Gleib has a run-in with Gussie Schnappmann (Maude Eburne).

The next morning, Gleib enters Dr. von Niemann's garden, where Dr. von Niemann, Karl and Ruth are discussing vampires inside the house. The town fathers enter the house and announce that Kringen is dead and that Gleib has gone missing. But Gleib is in the garden with Gussie. He distracts her with a rat, steals her food, then gives her a nice soft bat as a thanks. She faints and is awakened, not by Gleib, but by a slobbering Great Dane, causing Gussie to believe that the vampire can take the form of a dog as well as a bat!

The villagers hunt down Gleib with their hand-colored torches ablaze.

An angry mob hunts down Gleib and chases him through the countryside and into a cave, where he falls into a pit and dies.

Gleib being chased by the villagers through the Bronson caves.

Meanwhile, von Niemann's housekeeper Georgiana brings the doctor a crucifix that belonged to Martha, which she found in the servant Emil's room, whereupon von Niemann assures her that he will question Emil.

That night, Dr. von Niemann is seen telepathically controlling Emil, as he picks up sleeping Georgiana and takes her down to Dr. von Niemann's laboratory, where a strange organism is seen. They then drain her blood from her neck.

Gussie then discovers Georgiana's body in her bed. Dr. von Niemann and Brettschneider investigate and find Mueller's crucifix, which Gleib handled the night Dr. von Niemann visited her. Brettschneider is becoming more convinced of the presence of vampires in the village as no other plausible explanations for the deaths can be found. As Gleib was seen in the garden that morning, the two conclude he is guilty.

However, when he learns of Gleib's death, Karl is no longer convinced of his guilt. Dr. von Niemann tells Kurt to go home and take some sleeping pills he gives him, not knowing that they are really poison.

Dr. von Niemann grabs Ruth when he catches her snooping.

Later, Ruth discovers Dr. von Niemann telepathically controlling Borst, who is at Karl's house. Ruth isn’t sure what to do, but Dr. von Niemann takes control of her. He reveals that he has created an artificial lifeform and is using the blood to feed his organism. He ties Ruth up and gags her, and makes her sit so she can watch Karl’s blood get drained.

In a publicity photo, Ruth is tied and gagged in front of Dr. von Niemann's device and creature.

Borst supposedly enters with Karl's body on a trolley. Dr. von Niemann walks over to Borst, who is revealed to be Karl. Karl pulls a gun on Dr. von Niemann. He tells the doctor that he didn’t take the sleeping pills he gave him. The real Borst is unconscious on the trolley.

Karl reveals that he didn't take the sleeping pills the doctor sent home with him.

Borst revives and hear von Niemann try to blame him for the murders.

When Karl walks over to untie Ruth. he gets a little sloppy with the gun and Dr. von Niemann manages to wrestle it away. As the two continue to fight, Borst picks up the gun. He tells Karl to get Ruth out of there and once they’re gone, he shoots Dr. von Niemann before shooting himself.

Hearing the shots, Karl returns and finds the bodies and the container holding the tissue has shattered.

While there is no information about how well the film did at the box office, the reviews were probably mixed, judging by A.D.S.’s review in The New York Times, “Familiarity, in the case of these operating-room idylls, has bred indifference, and it is difficult to achieve any considerable state of alarm over the things that are happening to the actors at the Winter Garden (the theater showing the film).” While he doesn’t come out and say the film is bad, he does end his review with, “Mr. Atwill is the man to be watched by those who expect to be terrorized by 'The Vampire Bat.'” This doesn’t sound like a ringing endorsement to me.

However, in a more modern review of the film, John M. Miller writes for TCM that “In spite of all of the apparent borrowing, The Vampire Bat feels wildly original, the story veering from murder mystery to horror chiller to science fiction with ease.”

I find myself someplace in the middle. The story does seem to be a mixed bag of genres, though it’s more of skipping between them rather than any real development of murder mystery, horror, or science fiction. In reality,  the story is a murder mystery with the villain using the villagers’ belief in and fear of vampires to hide his crimes. The fact that the machine he uses recreates the illusion of a vampire’s bite just adds to that.

The science fiction part with the living creature, which looks like a small piece of durian, von Niemann has created, seems almost like an afterthought to pull the plot together. Why else would he be bleeding his victim’s dry?

You can tell that the film is from the pre-code era. We are shown puncture wounds on the necks of the dead, and treated to some surprisingly graphic dialogue as the Burgermeister describes them: "Two wounds on the neck, right at the jugular vein...pierced and spread apart just as if two fang-like teeth had bitten through the flesh and right into the vein. And in every case, a blood clot - eight inches from the victim's neck. The mark of the feast - the Devil's signature."

The film, thanks to the sets, looks very good for a low-budget film. The preservation that the film went through by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in 2017 improves the sound and picture, which includes atmospheric establishing shots, with plenty of bat-like swoops of the camera up and down village exteriors, thanks to the collaboration of director Frank Strayer and his photographer Ira H. Morgan. There is even some effective hand-coloring restored to the torch-carrying mob scene when the villagers hunt down Gleib.

And the actors also help raise this film above the usual poverty row fare. Atwill and Wray, who had worked together twice before, were big names at the time and seem to be reprising their roles from previous films; Atwill the mad man and Wray his victim. But given the fact that Wray was cast, there is really very little for her to do in the film. Known as an early scream queen, she is not even given the chance in this film. Even Dwight Frye seems to be channeling his portrayal of Renfield from Dracula here as Herman Gleib. Gleib is crazy without being evil, but the mannerisms seem very similar.

The biggest surprise in the cast maybe Melvyn Douglas. You normally think of him playing debonair men in films opposite Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford. Horror doesn’t seem to be the genre you associate him with, though his biggest film prior had been the comedy horror The Old Dark House, starring Boris Karloff, who was probably the biggest name in the genre at the time. Douglas seems comfortable as the hero of the story and as the love interest to Fay Wray.

All that said, Maude Eburne, who plays the neurotic aunt Gussie Schnappmann, nearly steals the show. She provides a comic relief that the somewhat stagy film needs. She would appear in over 100 films, beginning with silent films in 1915. A stage actress, known for humorous domestic roles, her first big film role was in The Bat Whispers (1930), a mystery. Despite that, Eburne is best known for her comedic roles on film, as in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).

You might need to be in the right mood to watch The Vampire Bat. For a horror film, the film really isn’t scary, but more atmospheric. The story doesn’t quite live up to the talent of the actors nor the sets used in the film. It looks better than it really is.