Directed by: Jean Yarbrough
Starring: Bela Lugosi, Suzanne Kaaren, Dave O’Brien, Guy Usher, Yolande Donlan, Donald Kerr
Produced by: Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC)
Screenplay by: John Thomas Neville
Original Story by: George Bricker
Runtime: Approximately 68 minutes
Black & White | United States

Released: December 13, 1940, a FRIDAY, of course!

STORY
All of Heathville knows Dr. Paul Carruthers as a brilliant, kindly physician and scientist.
They have absolutely no idea what he's growing in his laboratory.
Bela Lugosi stars as Carruthers, a gifted chemist whose discoveries helped make cosmetics manufacturers Martin Heath and Henry Morton enormously wealthy. Carruthers believes the men exploited his genius, taking the fortune while leaving the scientist with little more than resentment.
And Carruthers has had plenty of time to let that resentment grow.
So he does what any perfectly reasonable disgruntled scientist would do:
He breeds giant killer bats.
Carruthers has discovered a way to enlarge bats and condition them to attack when they encounter a particular scent. He then creates a special shaving lotion containing that scent and begins presenting it to the unsuspecting members of the families he blames for stealing his fortune.
Put on the lotion.
Step outside.
Meet the bat.
When members of the wealthy families begin dying under exceedingly strange circumstances, newspaper reporter Johnny Layton and photographer “One-Shot” McGuire arrive in Heathville to investigate.
Their trail eventually leads toward the one man no one would think to suspect—the respected Dr. Carruthers.
But Carruthers isn't finished.
With his laboratory, his secret formula and his increasingly hungry winged assassins, he intends to collect a very personal debt.
And Bela Lugosi is having an absolutely wonderful time collecting it.
AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

BELA GETS THE MOVIE.
There is no ambiguity about whose picture this is. Lugosi's Dr. Carruthers is simultaneously charming, wounded, sinister and completely bonkers. The movie gives him precisely the kind of grandly theatrical villainy that made him unforgettable.

WELCOME TO POVERTY ROW.
The Devil Bat came from Producers Releasing Corporation—PRC—one of Hollywood's so-called “Poverty Row” studios, companies known for producing movies quickly and inexpensively outside the major-studio system. AFI lists production as beginning in late October 1940, with the film released on December 13.

AIN REASON #1: THAT MAKES THIS AN INDIE ANCESTOR.
AIN celebrates independent filmmakers working today with limited resources, impossible schedules and enormous ambition. Eighty-six years ago, PRC filmmakers were doing their own version of exactly that: make the movie, solve the problems, get it finished and get it in front of an audience.
That makes Poverty Row cinema particularly at home inside the Treasure Chest of Entertainment.

IT ALMOST WASN'T CALLED THE DEVIL BAT.
AFI records the film's working title as Killer Bats.
Good movie title.
But come on.

THE DEVIL BAT.
There was only one correct decision.

THE BAT HAD AN ENCORE.
AFI notes that another version of John Neville's screenplay was filmed by PRC in 1946 as The Flying Serpent, directed by Sherman Scott and starring George Zucco.

AIN REASON #2: THE WEAPON IS AFTERSHAVE.
Forget silver bullets. Forget stakes through the heart. Forget ancient curses.
Carruthers' murder weapon begins with scented shaving lotion.
The sheer lunacy of weaponizing men's grooming products and using them to summon giant killer bats earns The Devil Bat a place in Fear Frenzy all by itself.

THE AIN REASON
Because sometimes a Treasure Chest needs a giant murderous bat.
The Devil Bat represents exactly the kind of movie Fear Frenzy was built to preserve and celebrate: strange, inexpensive, inventive genre filmmaking that doesn't apologize for what it is.
And at its center is Bela Lugosi.
Nine years after Dracula made his face and voice synonymous with screen horror, Lugosi takes a Poverty Row mad-scientist picture and treats Dr. Paul Carruthers as though he's playing the most important role in Hollywood.
That's part of the fun.
AIN isn't presenting The Devil Bat because it's polished prestige horror.
We're presenting it because it isn't.
It's scrappy. It's theatrical. It's ridiculous. It's creepy. It's funny when it probably doesn't intend to be. It's unmistakably of its era.
And more than eight decades later, we're still watching it.

For an independent network created by an independent filmmaker for independent filmmakers, there may be no better argument for keeping movies alive than that.
Welcome to Fear Frenzy, Bela.