The Most Frightened Eyes

Oh, Fay Wray, what big eyes you had! Here she is in 1933's The Vampire Bat, a cheap Dracula knock-off released a couple years after the Tod Browning film. Borrowing sets from James Whale movies and deploying some star quality with Wray, Lionel Atwill, and Melvyn Douglas, this film builds some atmosphere and has some nicely creepy shots but sabotages itself with a comedy subplot about a silly hypochondriac aunt.

In a small German town, there's a series of murders in which the victims are found with two puncture wounds and their bodies drained of blood. Melvyn Douglas as the local police inspector amusingly derides the very idea it could be a vampire.

Wray plays Douglas' fiancee, Ruth, who works as an assistant to Dr. Von Niemann (Atwill). She doesn't have much to do in the film beyond responding to her lover's flirtations until the end of the movie when she's kidnapped and starts showing those peepers.

It's not just that she has large eyes, it's that they don't usually look so large. They seem to triple in size when she's frightened which makes the whole situation weirder and more fascinating. Speaking of weird fascination, the film also has Dwight Frye in a role as a murder suspect.

Best known for playing Renfield in Browning's Dracula, he has the archetypical madman's face. I think his face is embedded in the subconscious of the world as the face of madness. He's nice and creepy in this movie, too, talking rapturously about how nice and soft bats are.

The Vampire Bat is available on Amazon Prime with an annoying watermark.

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A simple suit defined the furtive shape.
The glowing man awaits a rocket thought.
A magic wove the solid magnet cape.
Remembrance fills the shrinking metal pot.
The timer told its final temple dock.
Rerouted bins deployed the stuff to field.
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Producing toes engaged a digit yield.
The frozen ant contained a bead of sweat.
Mistaken heads were placed above the knee.
And never digits 'tween the knobs shall meet.
As limbs were sprouting far as eye could see.
Reliant madness makes the cave at dusk.
The herring cape was now a woollen husk.