The Devil Bat (1940)
He's Trained His Brood of Blood-Hungry Bats to Kill on Command!
Dr. Paul Carruthers is frustrated because he thinks his employers, Mary Heath and Henry Morton, have cheated him out of the company's profits. He decides to get revenge by altering bats to grow twice their normal size and training them to attack when they smell a perfume of his own making. He mixes the perfume into a lotion, which he offers as a gift to Mary and Henry. When they turn up dead, a newspaper reporter decides to investigate.
- Date of release
- 1940-12-13
- TMDB
- 5.3 / 10 (89)
- Runtime
- 1h 8m
- Genres
- Horror, Science Fiction, Crime
- Director
- Jean Yarbrough
- Collection
- The Devil Bat Collection
Casting
- Bela Lugosi — Dr. Paul Carruthers
- Suzanne Kaaren — Mary Heath
- Dave O'Brien — Johnny Layton
- Guy Usher — Henry Morton
- Yolande Donlan — Maxine
- Donald Kerr — 'One-Shot' McGuire
- Edmund Mortimer — Martin Heath
- Gene O'Donnell — Don Morton
- Alan Baldwin — Tommy Heath
- John Ellis — Roy Heath
- Arthur Q. Bryan — Joe McGinty
- Hal Price — Chief Wilkins
Interesting facts
The Devil Bat is a 1940 black-and-white American horror film produced by Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) and directed by Jean Yarborough. The film stars Bela Lugosi along with Suzanne Kaaren, Guy Usher, Yolande Mallott and the comic team of Dave O'Brien and Donald Kerr as the protagonists. It was the first horror film from PRC.
Production
PRC was a young studio when it planned to enter the horror film genre, which had been neglected by the major studios during 1937 and 1938. Lugosi was beginning a comeback when he signed a contract on October 19, 1940, with PRC's Sigmund Neufeld to star in the Poverty Row studio's first horror film.
The shooting of the film began a little more than one week later. PRC was known for shooting its films quickly and cheaply, but for endowing them with a plentiful amount of horror, and The Devil Bat established this modus operandi.
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