EDITOR’S NOTE: The Vampire Bat was on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 9, 1967 at 11:20 p.m. and Saturday, August 22, 1970 at 11:30 p.m. This episode was a welcome return, as the week before Chiller Theater was preempted for Adios Stakes Race at the Meadows and Midnight Put-On! Teenage Dance Party.

In the village of Kleinschloss, bats are draining people of their blood. Dr. Otto von Niemann (Lionel Atwill) has come to care for a young woman named Martha Mueller (Rita Carlisle) who has been attacked by a bat. She’s also visited by Hermann Gleib (Dwight Frye), who tells her not to worry about bats, as they are as soft as cats. In fact, he lives with the bats that he collects at night.

Karl Brettschneider (Melvyn Douglas), the law in this town, doesn’t believe the other villagers that vampires are behind all the blood-related deaths. Well, later that night, when Martha dies from two bite marks in her neck, he starts to. And as for Gleib, he runs from the dead girl screaming as a mob chases him off a cliff.

The truth? It’s the doctor, who has kidnapped Karl’s love Ruth (Fay Wray) and plans to feed her to the monster that he’s created, a beast that lives on blood.

Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray had a big movie with Dr. X and had just finished a follow-up, Mystery of the Wax Museum. That was a huge production, so in the time it was being finished, Majestic Pictures got them to make this quick and get it out a month before their much bigger film. It doesn’t look as cheap as the budget, as it uses the sets from Frankenstein and The Old Dark House.  They also went in and hand animated the torches in color, which adds something different.

Fay Wray sure was busy in 1933. She made eleven films that year: Mystery at the Wax Museum, King Kong, The Vampire Bat, Below the Sea, Ann Carver’s Profession, The Woman I Stole, Shanghai Madness, The Brain, The Bowery, One Sunday Afternoon and Master of Men.

You can watch this on Tubi.