The Bat

Roland West's The Bat is the old-dark-house thriller that taught a generation how to light a mansion for fear. Adapted from Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's 1920 Broadway smash, it sends a masked master criminal in a bat costume after stolen bank money at an estate rented by the gun-toting spinster Cornelia Van Gorder. William Cameron Menzies's Expressionist-Deco sets, photographed by Arthur Edeson with assistance from a young Gregg Toland, turn staircases and a bat-shaped signal into architecture of dread. West remade it as The Bat Whispers in 1930. Bob Kane later cited both films among the sources for Batman.