The Phantom Creeps

The Phantom Creeps (1939)

A mad scientist attempts to rule the world by creating various elaborate inventions.

Date of release
1939-01-07
TMDB
4.5 / 10 (25)
Runtime
4h 25m
Genres
Science Fiction, Horror
Director
Ford Beebe, Saul A. Goodkind

Casting

Interesting facts

The Phantom Creeps is a 1939 12-chapter science fiction horror serial starring Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Doctor Zorka, who attempts to rule the world by creating various elaborate inventions. In dramatic fashion, foreign agents and G-Men try to seize the inventions for themselves.

Production

The serial contains some similarities with the earlier serial The Vanishing Shadow, such as an invisibility belt and a remote-control robot. Stock footage was used from The Invisible Ray, including scenes of Dr. Zorka finding the meteorite in Africa. As with several Universal serials, some of the stock music came from Bride of Frankenstein. The Phantom Creeps' car chase was itself used as stock footage in later serials.

Universal tried to improve their serials by eliminating the written foreword at the start of each chapter. This led to The Phantom Creeps being the first serial in which the studio used vertically scrolling text as the foreword.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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