The Vampire Bat

The Vampire Bat from 1933 is a cheap, fog-soaked creepy little pre-Code bastard. Lionel Atwill plays the brilliant but completely cracked Dr. von Niemann, smiling like a man who just figured out how to turn blood into poetry while the whole village drops dead with every drop drained out of them. Fay Wray and Melvyn Douglas run around looking pretty and panicked in the middle of it all, shadows thick as cigarette smoke, laboratory sets dripping with that perfect low-budget dread that actually works. Pure B-movie trash from the early thirties, the kind you put on when you want to feel something cheap and real without all the Hollywood horseshit.