Bats Out of the Belfry

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat,

How I wonder what you’re at

Up above the world you fly

Like a tea tray in the sky.

~ Lewis Carroll

Among the iconic symbols of Halloween –- jack-o’-lanterns, ghosts, witches, skeletons, black cats, fishnet stockings – er, cobwebs -– none is more misunderstood, even maligned, than bats. Lolling upside down in caves and trees for over 50 million years, bats are the only mammals that can fly (and don’t get us started on flying squirrels, they merely glide between trees). Bats are not blind, nor are they rodents. Bats are timid by nature and prefer to avoid humans, although since the summer of 2009, an increasing number of vampire bats have been reported biting people in Peru; vampire bats are not bloodsuckers, they lap up the blood from a bite. Bats do not intentionally get tangled in people’s hair. More likely than not, those who claim to be victims of bat attacks were probably targeted by a nocturnal bird of prey, such as an owl.

Disdained as filthy disease carriers, they groom themselves meticulously (the smell associated with them comes from the guano and urine that accumulates below their topsy-turvy roosts), and less than one percent contract rabies.

 

"The bats chased the children a good distance, but the fugitives plunged
into every new passage that offered, and at last got rid of the perilous
things." - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
(Illustration by True Williams)

As a child, before he became world famous as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens often brought home a bat from a “great cave, three miles below Hannibal,” which was “multitudinously stocked” with bats. His patient mother invariably released the pocketed pets outside the home. What boy wouldn’t want a bat as a pet?

Bats are the only mammals capable of self-powered
flight, they are fussily self-grooming, and they sleep
upside down...What's not to love?

All this notwithstanding, because the bat is viewed as an image of the night, and all of humankind’s foreboding suspicions therein, it has long been associated, particularly in European cultures, with witchcraft and black magic. In Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” written in the early 1600s, the three Weird Sisters add “wool of bat” to their bubbling cauldron of witches’ brew.

The bat became the creature of choice to represent fictional characters of the night, good or evil, notably Batman and Dracula. As created by Irish novelist Bram Stoker in 1897, Count Dracula is a centuries-old vampire, sorcerer, and Transylvanian nobleman inhabiting a decaying castle in the Carpathian Mountains who claims to be descended from Atilla the Hun. In the novel Dracula, he can shape-shift at will, able to transform himself into a wolf, fog, and a bat.

In comic books, billionaire industrialist Bruce Wayne, who witnessed the shooting deaths of his parents as a child, is brooding in the study of his mansion when a bat flies in through an open window. Struck by the epiphany that “criminals are a superstitious, cowardly lot,” Bruce adopts the guise of a bat in order to strike fear into his adversaries while simultaneously concealing his identity.

In the late 1980s, when “Beetlejuice” director Tim Burton wanted to stir the pot with the depiction of the funny pages’ Batman as a complicated, conflicted crime fighter, he approached Pierce Brosnan, recently divested of his starring role as TV private eye “Remington Steele,” for the lead. “I went and met with Tim Burton for the role of Batman,” Brosnan later recounted. “But I just couldn’t really take it seriously. Any man who wears his underpants outside his pants just cannot be taken seriously.” Which pretty much sums up our take on the whole superhero movie universe, but we digress…

In the mid-2000s, when writer-director Chirstopher Nolan further mucked up the origins of the comics’ Caped Crusader with murky psychobabble in the “Dark Knight” trilogy starring Christian Bale, Bruce Wayne suffered from childhood chiroptophobia until, as an adult, he channeled his fear of bats into an “incorruptible” symbol of “something elemental, something terrifying.”

 

We're not sure about the origins of Batgirl, but frankly, glancing at the
fetching Yvonne Craig on TV's "Batman," we just don't care anymore.

According to Oaxaca folklore of southwestern Mexico, the bat’s nocturnal nature stems from its jealousy of birds’ plumage. Once adorned with beautiful feathers plucked from birds, the vain bat’s hubris led to the loss of its colorful raiment, after which the bat, ashamed of its appearance, hid in caves during the day and only came out at night to search for its long-lost feathers. In the mythology of pre-Columbian peoples in Latin America and northern South America, including the Olmecs, Mayans, and Aztecs, bats represented the underworld of the dead, as well as signifying destruction and decay.

Some attribute the fear of bats to a primordial dread rooted in our evolutionary origins. Joanne Canton, professor emeritus of communications sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained, “Intense fear memories are stored in the amygdala, in our old, reptilian brain,” located deep within the temporal lobes, This makes sense in light of a primal fear of oceanic predators, like the prehistoric, 60-foot megalodon, the largest carnivorous fish that ever lived, but when you look at bats, it’s difficult to imagine what primeval threat the winged fur-balls posed for any link along our evolutionary chain, unless one posits insects as our ancient predecessors. Nevertheless, as a character says in one of our featured movies, “Bats give everyone the creeps!”

Appropriately, we go batty in the Moviehouse and celebrate movies that take leathery wing just in time for All Hallows’ Eve.

Helen Chandler (as Mina) and David Manners (as Harker)
are threatened by a rubber bat in "Dracula" (1931).

Unmistakably a rubber prop on a visible wire, Hollywood’s premier vampire bat of note appeared in director Tod Browning’s 1931 film “Dracula,” starring (and forever typecasting) Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi. Nine years earlier, the filmmakers of the first screen adaptation of Bram Stoker’s gothic novel, titled “Nosferatu,” revered as a classic of silent German Expressionism, failed to obtain the movie rights to the book and, fearful of being sued by Stoker’s widow, altered the names of characters (Count Dracula became Count Orloc). The most significant change was having the vampire’s victims die of their puncture wounds – adding to the villagers’ dread of the Plague - in lieu of the tradition of becoming inductees into the undead.

(Left) Max Schreck in "Nosferatu" (1922); (right) Reggie Nalder in "Salem's Lot"
(1979)...Nalder recalled, "The makeup and contact lenses were painful,
but I got used to them. I liked the money best of all."

There are no vampire bats on the wing in “Nosferatu” (a name possibly derived from a Romanian epithet meaning “the repugnant one” or “the unclean one”), although actor Max Schreck’s grotesque makeup as Count Orloc unmistakably resembled a vampire bat, down to the pointed ears and incisor-placed fangs, as opposed to the canine fangs later popularized in “Dracula” films. In 1979, when future “Poltergeist” director Tobe Hooper made the TV miniseries “Salem’s Lot,” the character of Stephen King’s urbane and charming vampire, Mr. Barlow (portrayed by Reggie Nalder), was reimagined as a primeval monster modeled after Max Schreck’s bat-like appearance.

In the feverish frenzy of filmmaking called "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (which bears
little resemblance to the original novel, but director Francis Ford Coppola couldn't
use just "Dracula" becasue another studio owned the title), Gary Oldman, among
his several guises as the count, transforms into this disgusting bat-thingy.

Bela Lugosi had appeared in Hungarian and German silent pictures before emigrating to the U.S. in 1920. In 1927, he starred in the Broadway production of “Dracula,” reprising the role on film four years later. He played Dracula again in the 1948 comedy “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein” and appeared in character on TV variety programs in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. He portrayed Dracula clones in 1935’s “Mark of the Vampire” and 1944’s “The Return of the Vampire.” In fact, Bela Lugosi was buried in his Dracula cape, as requested by son Bela Lugosi Jr. and his fifth wife. Lugosi once said, “I am definitely doomed to be an exponent of evil.”

Although not portraying a vampire himself, Bela Lugosi was cast in 1940’s “The Devil Bat” (pictured above) as a kindly small-town GP–cosmetic company chemist-mad scientist whose “theory of glandular stimulation through electrical pulses” (or “busses” or whatever Lugosi’s thick Hungarian accent slurs over) creates oversized killer bats that react savagely to an aftershave lotion laced with a perfume used in Tibetan lamas’ religious rites in the doc’s insidious revenge plot against his rich employers. In clever exchanges of foreboding dialogue, whenever an unbeknownst victim bids the neighborly doctor goodnight, he ominously intones, “Good…bye.”

Bela never looked happier. On a sad note, the last feature film directed by Jean
Yaarbrough was the 1967 cheapie "Hillbillys in a Haunted House," teaming
country music singers Ferlin Husky, Merle Haggard, and Sonny James with
infirm horror veterans John Carradine, Lon Chaney Jr., and Basil Rathbone.

Directed by Jean Yarbrough (best known for directing a number of Abbott and Costello comedies in the 1940s), “The Devil Bat” featured an actor named Dave O’Brien as a wisecracking, pistol-packing “famous reporter.” O’Brien was immortalized in the 1931 cult exploitation film “Reefer Madness” (pictured below) as the frenzied addict who yells, “Play it faster! Play it faster!” at a girl on the piano and ends up in an asylum for the criminally insane “for the rest of his natural life.”

In “Chosen Survivors” (1974), 11 individuals have been specially selected to subsist in a luxurious subterranean environment – 1758 feet below a New Mexico desert (why not just 1700 feet?...why not 1760 feet?) – to ensure humankind’s survival after an imminent thermonuclear war. Humanity’s hope for the future is entrusted to a number of scientists, along with a congresswoman, an Olympic gold medalist, and a corporate mogul. The sole representative of the arts is a novelist. Unfortunately for everybody, a colony of vampire bats in a nearby cavern infiltrate the supposedly secure compound. (Never mind the fact that there are no vampire bats in the U.S. They are native to Central America and South America, while most bats in the U.S. are insectivores.)

Lincoln Kilpatrick, Alex Cord, Gwenn Mitchell, Nancy Rodman, Richard Jaeckel,
Barbara Babcock, Diana Muldaur, and Bradford Dillman make a grisly discovery
in "Chosen Survivors."

Director Sutton Roley had a number of TV series to his credit, and “Chosen Survivors” has an unmistakable made-for-television air about it, personified in the presence of such familiar faces from the small-screen as Bradford Dillman, Alex Cord (the white-eyepatched “Archangel” in “Airwolf”), Diana Muldaur (Dr. Pulaski on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”), Barbara Babcock (Grace Gardner on “Hill Street Blues”), and Lincoln Kilpatrick (Lt. Hoyt on “Matt Houston”).

Diana Muldaur and Alex Cord, looking very 1970s in "Chosen Survivors"

Jackie Cooper, a former child actor (at age nine a Best Actor Oscar nominee for 1931’s “Skippy”) who found renewed fame in the 1970s as Daily Planet editor Perry White in the Christopher Reeve “Superman” movies and later made a successful transition to directing, winning Emmy Awards for “The White Shadow” and “M*A*S*H,” not to mention becoming an accomplished auto racer, chews up the futuristic scenery in “Chosen Survivors” as the lecherous, troublemaking business tycoon.

Richard Jaeckel in one of his best screen roles, "Sometimes a Great Notion"
(1971), directed by and starring Paul Newman

Richard Jaeckel, from his start as a peach fuzz-cheeked recruit in movies like “Guadalcanal Diary” (1943), “Battleground” (1949), and “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949) to his Oscar-nominated role as Paul Newman’s doomed brother in “Sometimes a Great Notion” (1971) and beyond, remained an actor who was always superior to a lot of the throwaway parts he was often given, and here he rises above the limitations of his appearance as an army major overseeing the chosen survivors.

Bradford Dillman and his fellow "Chosen Survivors" in a wide-angle
composition obviously inspired by Stanley Kubrick

Reviewing “Chosen Survivors” for The Village Voice, George Morris noted, “The pseudo-Kubrick posturings and pretensions to significance jar with the pulp ingredients implicit in the material, and Roley’s decision to take it all so seriously denied the film the one element every science fiction movie should have: fun.”

Be forewarned, the title “The Bat People”  (like “Chosen Survivors,” from 1974) is a misnomer. There’s one “Bat Person,” a honeymooning research immunologist who has a violent reaction to a bat attack in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Cavern. Stewart Moss, a bland TV actor, who, coincidentally, looks a lot like “Chosen Survivor’s” Bradford Dillman, must have landed the lead role through his peculiar ability to roll his eyes all the way back into his head prior to his metamorphoses.

"The Bat People" costar Marianne McAndrew in a much better movie,
"Hello, Dolly!" as hat shop owner and eligible widow Irene Molloy

Moss’ bride is portrayed by real-life wife Marianne McAndrew (who had a fourth-billed role in the 1969 musical “Hello, Dolly!” starring Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau), and there’s a natural chemistry between the two. Michael Pataki, a veteran of drive-in fodder like “Dracula’s Dog,” Pink Angels,” and “The Dirt Gang,” plays the obligatory, annoying town cop. You can tell the film’s bargain budget when Pataki repeatedly radios for backup units, and his remains the sole patrol car on-camera. Film collector Geoff Wallis pointed out that films like “Bat People” were “made by people who cared – they really tried to make the best film they could for $60,000, which makes them a joy to watch.” (Not to do with anything, but dig those 39 cents per gallon gas station signs!)

The village constable (Michael Pataki) in "The Bat People"
has obviously been watchng too many episodes of "McCloud."

Lou Shaw, who created the Jack Klugman series “Qunicy, M.E.,” scripted and produced “The Bat People,” while the directing duties were handled by Jerry Jameson, a TV journeyman who occasionally was assigned splashy big-screen pulp such as “Airport ’77” (where else would one find a movie costarring Jack Lemmon, James Stewart, and Christopher Lee?) and “Raise the Titanic,” featuring Jason Robards, Richard Jordan, and Alec Guinness.

Shaw’s screenplay actually aspires to a moment of potboiler transcendence when Moss’ tragic character records his last will and testament, stating, “Something within my psyche has emerged, has helped me reach a new consciousness, a sharp awareness of truth, untouched by human greed or ambition, free from the negative, the hypocrite…I’m part of everything now. I’ve journeyed to a belonging,” foreshadowing by more than a dozen years Jeff Goldblum’s declaration in “The Fly,” “Insects don’t have politics…No compassion, no compromise…I’m an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over, and the insect is awake.”

“Chosen Survivors” was the first feature film makeup gig for Stan Winston, the visual effects and special effects makeup wizard who would win Academy Awards for “Aliens,” “Terminator 2,” and “Jurassic Park,” along with Oscar nominations for “Predator,” “Edward Scissorhands,” and “Batman Returns.”

"The Bat - er - Person" Stewart Moss, before and after his transformation

The bat special effects were supervised by Tony Urbano, a master of hand puppets, marionettes, and animatronics who also provided bat effects for “Chosen Survivors.” A multi-Emmy Award winner (his contributions to TV commercials include the talking Parkay margarine tub and Snuggle Bear) who worked on “Short Circuit,” “Men in Black,” “Men in Black II,” and “Team America: World Police,” Urbano regretfully turned down Jim Henson’s offer to work with him at the onset of “Sesame Street” because he hated Manhattan.

In the 1970s into early 1980, when nature-goes-berserk pictures were popular – “Frogs,” “Jaws,” “Squirm” (bloodthirsty worms), "Orca: The Killer Whale," "The Pack" (wild dogs), “Empire of the Ants,” “Piranha,” “The Swarm” (killer bees), “Arachnophobia” (spiders), “Alligator” – Arthur Hiller, a director popular for lighter fare like “Love Story,” “Silver Streak,” and (the original) “The In-Laws,” made his only horror picture, “Nightwing” (1979), which shoehorns Native American mysticism into a cautionary ecological fable, very much like “Prophecy,” director John Frankenheimer’s  “monster movie” about a bear mutated by industrial pollution, which was released one week before “Nightwing.”

On a New Mexico Indian reservation targeted for exploitation by an oil company, the tribal medicine man (played by Native Canadian actor George Clutesi, who had a similar role in “Prophecy”) casts a spell to end white man’s ecological meddling, unleashing a colony of bubonic plague-carrying vampire bats. The bats were depicted through a combination of real bat footage, optical animation (like Hitchcock’s “The Birds”), and animatronic puppets and marionettes created by Carlo Rambaldi, an Oscar winner for his work on “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “Alien.”

Nick Mancuso as Youngman Duran in "Nightwing"

Nick Mancuso plays a Hopi lawman at odds with the opportunistic tribal council chairman, portrayed by Stephen Macht, endeared to bad movie buffs as the loopy textile mill foreman in Stephen King’s “Graveyard Shift" (see below).

In 1990's "Graveyard Shift," featuring Brad Dourif (the longtime
screen voice of Chucky, the serial-killing doll in the "Child's Play"
horror franchise) as a wigged-out rodent exterminator, a hairless,
bear-sized bat lords over a textile mill's rat population.

Kathryn Harrold (Albert Brooks’ frustrated girlfriend in “Modern Romance”) costars in "Nightwing" as a dedicated medical student.

Kathryn Harrold poses in a publicity photo for "Nightwing."

Along comes David Warner, a talented actor who could capably portray a good guy (“The Omen”) as well as a villain (“Time After Time”), as a present-day Van Helsing obsessed with destroying vampire bats. Insisting that vampire bats take from nature but give nothing back, he disserts on the “stench of ammonia” and “foul syrup of digested blood” that bats “piss on cave floors” and claims that, according to the Koran, Jesus created the first bat.

In "Nightwing," David Warner describes a typical bat cave as
"millions of bats wrestling, fighting, mating, hanging upside down
...They are the quintessence of evil!"

Based on the novel by Martin Cruz Smith (author of Gorky Park and seven additional novels featuring Soviet detective Arkady Renko) and featuring an acclaimed, haunting music score by Henry Mancini, the film suffered from preachy politicking. DVD Talk critic Stuart Galbraith IV remarked that “far too much running time is given over to mumbo-jumbo about Indian curses.” The New York Times’ Vincent Canby noted, “Mr. Hiller is credited as the director of the film but it looks as if it had been put together from a child’s instruction book.”

Mutant creatures, an inevitable result of government genetic experiments gone wrong in movies such as 1999’s “Bats,” become intelligent, vicious omnivores and terrorize a small Texas town, where, coincidentally, “Nosferatu” is showing at the local cinema (why a silent picture would be playing in a Texas hamlet population 7000 is anybody’s guess).

Costars Lou Diamond Phillips and Dina Meyer discuss character motivation
with director Lewis Morneau on the set of "Bats."

Lou Diamond Phillips, who seems to appear regularly in bad movies on the SyFy Channel, portrays the town’s stalwart sheriff in what director Lewis Morneau described as “sort of ‘The Birds’ with bats.” Costar Bob Gunton said, “We even have a blonde like Tippi Hedren – Dina Meyer…Va-va-va-voom!” Meyer (best known to horror film fans as the ill-fated Detective Allison Kerry in the “Saw” films) plays the stalwart Centers for Disease Control doctor.

(Left) Leon (Robinson), best known for his role as a Jamaican bobsledder in
1993's "Cool Runnings," starring John Candy, plays the obligatory comedy-relief
computer whiz in "Bats," starring Dina Meyer and Lou Diamond Phillips.

According to Bob Gunton, “The audience wants to be transported to those real primal fears.” Of course, Gunton, best known as the evil warden in “The Shawshank Redemption,” is the evil scientist who altered a pair of bats that escape from his evil lab and start mating with their bug-eating cousins.

Bob Gunton...never trust this guy when he pops up in a film...

A.V. Club reviewer Nathan Rabin commented, “There’s something a bit reassuring about the fact that a B-movie as cheap and transparent as ‘Bats’ can enjoy any kind of release at all.” However, he concluded, “ ‘Bats’ should at least be stupid fun. Instead it’s just stupid.” In The New York Times, critic Lawrence Van Gelder wrote, “As the heroes plod through guano to a predictable finish, the pulse remains steadfastly unaccelerated.” He noted, “Masquerading as a Halloween season horror film, this noisy version of a washed-out formula is cause for fright in only one respect: the possibility that it could spawn sequels.”

Bat duties onscreen in "Bats" were handled by animatronic puppets,
computer-generated imagery, and two real bats.

Well, in 2007, the brain trust at the SyFy Channel did give us an in-name-only sequel, “Bats: Human Harvest,” featuring a group of Delta Force soldiers in Chechnya who battle genetically altered flesh-eating bats, all in all an excuse to shoot a flick on the cheap in Bulgaria with unattractive Eastern European actors who only get film work when the SyFy Channel shoots crappy movies in Eastern Europe.

Actress Polyanna McIntosh, who portrays a CIA agent
named Katya, doesn't dress up anything like this in
"Bats: Human Harvest," but this is better looking than
anything in the actual movie...

Mutant killer bats fly again in 2002’s “Fangs.” Considering that it was co-produced and directed by Kelly Sandefur, the co-creator and co-executive producer of the Disney Channel sitcom “The Suite Life of Zack & Cody,” from a screenplay by Jim Geoghan, who scripted a number of episodes of “The Suite Life,” “Fangs” could be called a “family” mutant-killer-bat movie. People die (along with – shamefully – a hapless dog), but as the film progresses, characters take things increasingly less seriously, up to the climax, when the obvious villain is unveiled and viewers expect him to say, “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”

Tracy Nelson poses for the Hollywood 8x10 - er - headshot.

Teaming up as a dynamic duo of bat combatants, fledgling police detective Tracy Nelson (familiar to TV viewers as streetwise, crime-solving Sister Stephanie – “Steve” – on the late 1980’s series “Father Dowling Mysteries,” starring Tom Bosley) and animal control doctor (“the town dogcatcher”) Whip Hubley (younger brother of actress Season Hubley) spar with each other in wisecracking dialogue obviously inspired by the snappy repartee between Bridget Fonda and Bill Pullman in the 1999 tongue-in-cheek monster-crocodile film “Lake Placid,” written by David E. Kelley (best known as the creator of several hit TV series, including “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Legal”).

Tracy Nelson: "What are we looking for?"
Whip Hubley: "Bat droppings."
Tracy: "What do bat droppings look like?"
Whip: "You know what cow droppings look like, right?
Well, bat droppings are the same, only smaller."
Tracy: "Cute. That's real cute."

Like Lou Diamond Phillips, Corbin Bernsen was busy around this time in a number of SyFy Channel potboilers, such as “Vipers,” “Raging Sharks,” “Atomic Twister,” and “Raptor.” Bernsen, long past his prime-time as the tousled blonde heartthrob from “L.A. Law,” hams it up mercilessly as a greedy, corrupt real estate mogul who is not about to let a few hundred bats ruin his big sales pitch for a new housing development at the town’s Apple Festival Dance. Ever since the mayor didn’t close the beach for the Fourth of July in “Jaws,” there’s always an endangered festival or celebration in movies like this that pigheaded officials refuse to shut down.

Once Corbin Bernsen realized his locks were a lost cause, he started shaving his
head, although he lamented, "I'm telling you, bald is not good for business."

Industrial waste thoughtlessly dumped in a Louisiana river creates - you guessed it – mutant vampire bats -with extra fangs! - in the unimaginatively titled “Vampire Bats,” starring Lucy Lawless (TV’s “Xena: Warrior Princess”) as a biology teacher, with onetime serious actor Timothy Bottoms, Alabama-born standup comedian Brett Buttler (TV’s “Grace Under Fire”), and a cameo by late night TV talk show host Craig Ferguson as a fisherman who falls victim to the voracious vampire bats. Hurricane Katrina forced the crew to evacuate the production, and the movie was finished in Nova Scotia.

Craig Ferguson is ready for his closeup in "Vampire Bats."

Postlude

It’s time we give bats their due in the Moviehouse. In fact, three U.S. states have an official state bat. Texas and Oklahoma both claim the Mexican free-tailed bat. Virginia honors the Virginia big-eared bat (pictured below). Unfortunately, the general assembly of North Carolina considered a bill in 2007 that would have made Rafinesque’s big-eared bat its state bat, but the bill died in the state senate.

Among some Native Americans, such as the Creek, Cherokee, and Apache, the bat is respected as a trickster spirit. Chinese lore purports that the bat is a symbol of longevity and happiness, and is similarly deemed a lucky talisman in Poland and among Arabs and Pacific Northwest indigenous people.

Heck, there are even a number of popular children's books about bats perched on the shelves, including Bats Around the Clock, Hello, Bumblebee Bat, and the 1993 best seller Stellaluna, about a female Megabat written by St. Paul, Minnesota, author-illustrator Janell Cannon. In 2005, Cannon received a Bat Conservation Award, and, in a 2012 poll, the School Library Journal recognized Stellaluna as #71 among the "Top 100 Picture Books."