The Vampire Bat (1933)

(On Cable TV, September 2022) I’m not going to overstate The Vampire Bat’s inherent interest, although it ends up being more than what it feels like at first—the sombre mystery of a vampire killer in a small Eastern-European village ends up being both more mundane and so more interesting than what we could have expected of a vampire film of the era. The film’s production history explains why the sets are more sumptuous than what we’d expect from a poverty row studio (i.e.: They shot in sets built by Universal for their horror productions), but the presence of Melvyn Douglas, Fay Wray and many crewmembers from bigger-budgeted production also explains why this hasn’t been forgotten along films made by other low-rent studios. This being said, this isn’t as high-octane as other horror films of the era. The resolution is decidedly non-supernatural, and if the atmosphere carries much of the film, there’s no sharp spike of interest to the proceedings. Some of the forthright dialogue carries a Pre-Code charge, but not much else. Plus, at 63 minutes, The Vampire Bat doesn’t have much time for niceties other than driving the plot forward. It’s not bad—but maybe more as a better-than-average example of horror-themed films of that time rather than being all that good by itself.