THE VAMPIRE BAT (1933)

Director: Frank R. Strayer

Writer: Edward T. Lowe

Producer: Phil Goldstone

Cast: Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Melvyn Douglas, Dwight Frye, Maude Eburne, Robert Frazer, George E. Stone, Lionel Belmore, Rita Carlisle, Stella Adams, William V. Mong, Paul Weigel, Harrison Greene, William Humphrey, Fern Emmett, Carl Stockdale, Paul Panzer, D’Arcy Corrigan

In the German town of Kleinschloss, a series of murders are leaving victims drained of blood. Police Inspector Karl Brettschnieder (Melvyn Douglas) is baffled. He believes the assailant is human, while most of the villagers attribute the killings to a vampire. Village physician Dr. Otto von Neimann (Lionel Atwill) is also seriously suggesting that Brettschneider consider the possibility of a vampire in their midst.

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This film is a peculiar little mix of horror movie influences that creates something quirky and unique. While using leftover sets on the Universal Pictures lot just as that studio was setting the standards for movie horror in the new talkies era, The Vampire Bat goes its own strange way. It also stars the trio that appeared in some of the best horror films of the 1930s: Lionel Atwill, Dwight Frye, and Fay Wray.

The Germanic setting may have been dictated by the availability of some of the Frankenstein (1931) sets that were being used by this independent production. It also puts us right back into the European locale audiences were conditioned to accept as a hotbed for the supernatural because of classic novels and their movie adaptations. The atmosphere is certainly enhanced by those cobble stone streets and old street lamps. The preponderance of bats hanging around town adds to the creepy ambience.

Another ’30s horror film ingredient is the unforgettable Dwight Frye as the dim-witted Herman. Due to his crazed and unsavory 1931 roles in Dracula and Frankenstein, Frye is immediately looked upon with suspicion by the audience as well as the villagers. His habits of taunting the villagers in a threatening manner while laughing fiendishly and playing with bats do not enhance his Gemütlichkeit.

Supernatural considerations conflicting with rational, modern thinking were themes also dealt with in Dracula. This film has a Van Helsing-like character in Dr. Otto von Niemann as the scholar that is quite learned on the history of vampirism. He confounds the skepticism of the inspector trying to solve the crimes.

The Vampire Bat presents us with elements that were already on the verge of becoming clichés in horror films, yet these are often used to misdirect or lead to unexpected conclusions: the ever-present superstitions of the town folk, the town misfit acting alternately sinister and harmlessly befuddled, the mob of torch wielding villagers chasing down their suspect, the scientist trying to validate the supernatural, and a black-garbed fiend creeping across rooftops and invading homes to leave behind bloodless corpses.

Melvyn Douglas, as Inspector Karl Brettschneider, is refreshingly capable as the hero and romantic lead. That is quite a departure from the Universal Pictures template that this film wants the audience to think it is emulating. Brettschneider is both good-humored and dedicated. He is also frustrated at the ongoing series of killings that he seems helpless to prevent in his duties as a police inspector. This makes him instrumental in the story’s conclusion. He is not the helpless bystander that David Manners had to play so often in his Universal-horror-film-leading roles.

As Karl’s girlfriend, Ruth Bertin, the lovely Fay Wray is as adorable as ever and adds a bit of levity and romance to the proceedings. Amazingly, one of horror’s most iconic scream queens never gives her lungs a workout in The Vampire Bat.

Many critics bemoan the inclusion of comedy relief in old-time horror movies. There is plenty of it here in the character of Ruth’s Aunt Gussie Schappman (Maude Eburne). Her comedy is usually on the mark as she is interacting and conflicting with the main characters in amusing ways. Her interaction with Herman is funny and makes him seem quite sympathetic. That sympathy pays off later.

There is another ’30s horror angle that figures into the menace when fully revealed in The Vampire Bat. It demonstrates a bit of megalomania that is the most monstrous thing about the story. We see that an ambition is being pursued at a terrible cost for a goal that, as shown, seems of questionable value. I find this to be the most odd and satisfying aspect of this film. It is truly evil.

A telepathy gimmick is used in a unique and deadly manner, but it is never explained. Frankly, that is a bit lazy on the part of the writer, though I do like its use in the story. Some of the details concerning the blood draining of the victims are also rather vague. Midway through the film we see that process explicitly, but it raises questions as to how and why other victims are found dead in their homes. Did all the victims get dealt with in such an impractical manner?

Overall, The Vampire Bat is great antique horror fun. It has plenty of atmosphere and lots of traditional “horror stuff” that teases the audience before revealing the full truth behind the menace. Star Lionel Atwill, who became a horror film regular during the ’30s and ’40s, has never been better. Fay Wray’s beauty and charm are always welcome. Most importantly, Dwight Frye demonstrates that one’s pets should be adopted from an animal shelter or a reputable breeder. A pet bat may be cheap and conveniently fit in your pocket, but your reputation is bound to suffer.

NIGHT MONSTER (1942)

Director: Ford Beebe

Writer: Clarence Upson Young

Producer: Ford Beebe

Cast: Ralph Morgan, Don Porter, Irene Hervey, Leif Erickson, Fay Helm, Doris Lloyd, Nils Asther, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, Janet Shaw, Frank Reicher, Francis Pierlot, Robert Homans, Cyril Delavanti

People are found strangled to death around the swamp of Pollard Slough. At the nearby Ingston Towers estate, patriarch Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan) has summoned the three doctors that were unable to cure the ailment that has turned him into an invalid. Kurt’s distraught sister Margaret (Fay Helm) has summoned a doctor of her own, psychiatrist Dr. Lynn Harper (Irene Hervey). Margaret is troubled by the terrible evil she senses in the Ingston household and wants Dr. Harper to determine her sanity. Margaret’s fears seem justified as more killings continue within Ingston Towers.

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It seems odd to me that the '40s horror movie factory of Universal Pictures would produce a film that turned out like Night Monster. Since horror had been Universal’s bread and butter for over a decade at this point, getting two of the genre’s stars in the same film must have been by design, right? After all, Bela Lugosi and Lionel Atwill headed up the cast of Universal’s Son of Frankenstein (1939) that restored the popularity of horror at the box office. However, when their services are secured for co-starring in another fright flick, despite their star billing, both Lugosi and Atwill play rather minor characters. That’s a mystery even more puzzling than the identity of the murdering fiend in this movie.

Perhaps the advantage of directing B-movies in Hollywood’s golden age was that one could get away with more eccentricities. Because the smaller budgeted and shorter scheduled productions were not as financially risky, they were probably not as closely supervised. So long as they met genre requirements and stayed on time and on budget, the B-film directors were probably given more freedom. In the case of Night Monster, maybe Ford Beebe, as both director and producer, was allowed to seemingly squander the established horror names in his cast. Since the story operates as both a mystery and a horror thriller, Beebe may have thought that Lugosi and Atwill would act best as potential suspects in the story and disrupt genre expectations.

Ford Beebe specialized in directing westerns and action serials. He certainly manages to keep things moving in Night Monster, yet he also generates a lot of atmosphere and builds up to his horror climaxes very effectively. Apparently, the old pro really knew what he was doing and could apply his know-how to any genre. No less a talent than Alfred Hitchcock is supposed to have admired Beebe’s work on Night Monster.

While Irene Hervey, as the beautiful Dr. Harper, and Don Porter, as mystery writer Dick Baldwin, present us with an obvious romance in the offing, they are both quite low-keyed. She is always a levelheaded professional while he is relaxed, humorous, and even self-deprecating.

The rest of the characters are an important reason the film maintains interest. Most of the characters have conflicts and quirks that make them distinctive. My favorite performer is Leif Erickson as the lecherous lout Laurie, the Ingstons' chauffeur. Anything in a skirt is fair game for this big brute, which, of course, makes him an obvious suspect. He would be just as memorable and unpleasant a decade later in the surreal sci-fi creeper Invaders from Mars (1953).

Night Monster is a fun little chiller that is most remarkable due to its unique menace. I can’t recall any other fright flick that uses a phenomenon quite like the one found here. The film also manages a lot of atmosphere with its traditional old-dark-house-thriller styled setting. Add to this a cast of strange characters, mysticism, a foggy swamp, and an escalating body count, and you wind up with Universal Pictures’ most unjustly overlooked movie from their '40s horror heyday.

MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM (1933)

Director: Michael Curtiz

Writers: Don Mullaly, Carl Erickson, Charles S. Belden (original story)

Producers (uncredited): Henry Blanke, Hal B. Wallis

Cast: Glenda Farrell, Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Frank McHugh, Edwin Maxwell, Allen Vincent, Gavin Gordon, Arthur Edmund Carewe, Holmes Herbert, Claude King, Thomas E. Jackson, DeWitt Jennings, Matthew Betz, Monica Bannister 

In 1921 London, sculptor Ivan Igor’s (Lionel Atwill) waxworks museum is set on fire for the insurance money by his unscrupulous business partner Joe Worth (Edwin Maxwell). The two men fight amid the blaze, and Igor is left unconscious as the museum burns down. Twelve years later, Igor is opening a new wax museum in New York City. Due to injuries suffered in the fire that destroyed his London museum, Igor is crippled and can no longer sculpt, but he instructs other artists to do the work of recreating his exhibits. Meanwhile, newspaper reporter Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell) is investigating the suicide of a beautiful model (Monica Bannister) and learns that the woman’s body has disappeared from the morgue. She soon notices that the Joan of Arc wax figure in Igor’s museum bears a striking resemblance to the missing suicide victim. 

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Mystery of the Wax Museum is director Michael Curtiz’s horror follow-up to his Doctor X (1932). It inherits many of that earlier film’s advantages, while benefiting from a more logical plot. Once again, it stars Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray, it is filmed using the innovative two-strip Technicolor process, it touches upon some pre-Code subjects that would soon be glossed over or removed from later Hollywood films, and its depression era, big city setting provides grit and energy to the proceedings.

The film even shares set pieces with the earlier Doctor X. There is another morgue scene dealt with in more sinister fashion, another shocking reveal of the movie’s menace, a strange, vast set where we learn of the villain’s weird motives, and the final battle while trying to save the damsel in distress. 

This film’s greatest attribute is Glenda Farrell. As brassy, beautiful, blonde newspaper reporter Florence Dempsey, she provides the mile-a-minute banter and the perseverance to dig out the story that leads us to the revelations behind this movie’s menace. She also provides plenty of caustic contrast to the innocence of her lovely roommate, Charlotte Duncan (Fay Wray). Despite her hard-boiled front, Farrell’s Florence Dempsey manages to be a very appealing character. Farrell would go on to star again as a feisty newswoman in the '30s Torchy Blane film series. Superman’s co-creator and writer, Jerry Siegel, was inspired by Farrell’s performances when he added reporter Lois Lane to his hero’s supporting cast of characters. 

The edgier topics touched upon by this pre-Code film are Dempsey’s potential love interest having a history of living with a woman out of wedlock and buying prohibition era bootleg booze, another character being a drug addict and the cops waiting for his withdrawal pains to make him spill some information, Dempsey snatching up a few bottles of bootleg booze right under the noses of the police and telling them that they’ll also take some for themselves, and Dempsey’s greeting to a cop reading a Naughty Stories pulp magazine, “How’s your sex life?” All of these bits ground the film in an earthy, urban environment that humanizes the characters and reminds us that this bizarre mystery is happening in a real world. 

Overall, the film’s construction is more measured and its characters more engaging than the earlier Doctor X. While both films have their very satisfying horror highlights, striking sets, and thrilling climaxes, Mystery of the Wax Museum is a bit more polished and rational as a whole. Both films are fine examples of horror in the early talkies era, and it is a shame that director Curtiz only returned to the genre once more with The Walking Dead (1936). 

When the film was remade as House of Wax (1953), it featured another contemporary cinema innovation/gimmick by being shot in full color 3-D. Like Lionel Atwill in the earlier version, House of Wax star Vincent Price would soon become a horror movie mainstay. 

Both versions are great fun, but I tend to lean toward the original. It seems just a bit more subversive and crackles with that hard-bitten, depression era energy radiating from Glenda Farrell that can always inspire a bit of hope in hard times.

DOCTOR X (1932)

Director: Michael Curtiz

Writers: Robert Tasker, Earl Baldwin, George Rosener (uncredited), based on the 1931 play The Terror by Howard W. Comstock and Allen C. Miller

Producers: Hal B. Wallis (uncredited), Darryl F. Zanuck (uncredited)

Cast: Lee Tracy, Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Preston Foster, John Wray, Harry Beresford, Arthur Edmund Carewe, George Rosener, Leila Bennett, Robert Warwick, Willard Robertson, Thomas E. Jackson, Mae Busch, Harry Holman, Tom Dugan 

New York City newspaper reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) is investigating a series of grisly murders that are being committed during nights of the full moon. He discovers that the police have called in Dr. Jerry Xavier (Lionel Atwill), the director of the local surgical research academy, to examine the body of the latest victim. Dr. Xavier concludes that the latest victim, like the others, was strangled, cannibalized, and had a wound to the brain inflicted with a scalpel. Since the scalpel that was used is of a special type only available locally at Xavier’s academy, police conclude that someone at the institute must be the murderer. To avoid bad publicity for his academy, Dr. Xavier makes a deal with the police to conduct an experiment to expose the killer.

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Warner Brothers/First National’s Doctor X is a remarkable, and sometimes outrageous, pre-Code horror film that distinguishes itself from its competition and manages to be lively, moody, and entertaining. It boasts a fantastic and fiendish climax that really hits that horror sweet spot. It should be as well remembered as the early talkie classics Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931) from Universal Pictures.

Doctor X is one of the early two-strip Technicolor process films. The surreal color palette created by the limitations of that motion picture innovation lends a weird atmosphere to this feature. This technical gimmick is almost all the movie seems to be remembered for by many. This is quite unfair as Doctor X was a unique horror film, and it dealt with some edgy material that the Motion Picture Production Code would ban in film production a few years later. 

None other than Michael Curtiz directed Doctor X. Yup, the guy that made Casablanca (1942); maybe you’ve heard of it. Curtiz lavishes lots of weird angles, creepy shadows, and stark lighting upon the sets and cast. One year later, Curtiz would direct the lively and contemporary urban fright flick, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). His third Warner Brothers horror film The Walking Dead (1936) starred the great Boris Karloff. 

Speaking of stars, Doctor X boasts the debut horror film performances of two talents that would appear in some of the best of the genre in the '30s. Appropriately, soon-to-be scream queen Fay Wray’s first line is her trademark scream at soon-to-be horror movie reliable Lionel Atwill. Wray and Atwill would also go on to co-star in Mystery of the Wax Museum and The Vampire Bat (1933). Fay Wray achieved immortality as Ann Darrow, the beauty in the beast’s paw in King Kong (1933). Atwill would go on to play everything from mad scientists to red herrings in many more horror and mystery movies. He even starred as the evil mastermind Professor Moriarty opposite Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942). 

In the film’s very first scene, Doctor X establishes an eerie urban atmosphere. The foggy, nighttime, waterfront locale, with a morgue and a brothel on the same street, creates a hard-bitten environment that is mourned by the moans of ship horns. While newspaper reporter Lee Taylor’s scaredy-cat antics are meant to be the comedy relief so endemic to this film era, it also underscores the creepiness of the situation. 

What is most striking about this early scene is the casual mingling of our reporter hero Taylor in the whorehouse that he enters to make a call to his office. He is allowed the use of the phone without being a paying customer and sneaks some appreciative glances at a couple of the gals, then heads back outside to go about his business. This is the kind of streetwise camaraderie that was probably pretty typical among the working class in the big city during the hardscrabble times of the Great Depression. Later, there are also characters partaking in liquor, and Taylor makes a few quips about booze and even snags a flask to keep for “medicinal purposes.” Pre-Code films loved to tweak the noses of the temperance crowd during this prohibition era. This was still more of the working class sensibilities of the day that resonated with the audience. These were some of the attitudes that probably led to the stricter enforcement of the film censorship code beginning in 1934. Fortunately, prohibition ended by then, so movie characters weren’t condemned to drinking nothing stronger than soda pop. 

There are plenty of other edgy subjects dealt with once we arrive at Dr. Xavier’s surgical academy and are introduced to his staff of fellow doctors. This is one of the wildest aspects of the film; each of Xavier’s colleagues is made to seem as weird and potentially guilty as possible. Atwill’s Dr. Xavier also acts in a suspicious manner. In fact, each of the doctor characters are given the sort of scenes, props, and lighting that make them all seem to be mad scientists. Each of them has a rather convenient background or traumatic experience that seems perfectly appropriate for “the Moon Killer.” This is all very contrived, yet it is still quite a bit of giddy and ghoulish fun. 

However, contrivance reaches the breaking point when, as part of an experiment to determine if one of his fellow doctors is the killer, Dr. Xavier has somehow had lifelike wax figures created and brought to his country estate’s lab to put on display. These are all likenesses of the killer’s victims that Xavier hopes will elicit the reaction from the guilty man that his fantastic gizmos will detect. Just how the hell did Xavier have these wax figures created for his spur-of-the-moment experiment to expose the killer, when there is no reason they would have already been made? Perhaps Atwill’s Ivan Igor from Mystery of the Wax Museum was following the Moon Killer murders and made figures of the victims to display in his New York museum? Yeah, that’s it! Then all Xavier had to do was borrow them for his experiment! I’m a friggin’ genius! If I can figure that one out, I ought to be ingenious enough to invent my own synthetic flesh and become a porn star!