More comedy than 'horror':

Of course I almost forgot: the actor who used to be "Alfalfa" was killed by the time this picture was made.

I don't see it that way. To me this will never be and could never be JUST another murder mystery movie, this is one that should have gone down as a classic. Granted, I saw this for the first time when I was about 2 years old and it's been a favorite of mine since, and of course everything's scarier when you're 2 years old, but I'll tell you something, of all the times a movie has given me a nightmare in my life, The Bat is the one recurring figure who still terrifies me well into adulthood. A large part of that I think is that he's not like Freddy Krueger or Jason, he's a real person, it could very well happen, he's an intelligent person who knows how to break into your house, kill you, slip out, and he'll never be caught. That's a very scary thought and a lot of times fact.

Now, it's one thing that when I was six this movie terrified me to the point I wouldn't want to go to bed, but I've read reviews from other people who upon seeing it for the first time as adults, they felt a sudden urge to get up and check the windows to make sure nobody's creeping around the house. To some people this IS a very scary movie because it has that element of reality in it, that it IS possible, that it COULD happen, there ARE criminal geniuses who can get away with murder and the police never catch them.

And I think for my mother this might have really hit on to when she was a little girl in the 50s and there was a serial killer going around at the time, of course today you can't find anything on it, but when she was a child there was a killer who knew which people didn't lock their doors and would come into older women's homes and kill them, and he was never caught. So that occurring in real life during the same timeline, really adds to the thought that something like this COULD Happen, which I think is why this terrified me as a kid and House on Haunted Hill did not, because I knew that nobody gets invited to a haunted house party and the guests die one by one, but people break into homes all the time and are never caught.

Now, if it's comedy you're really looking into, you need to look into the two previous versions of this movie, The Bat from 1926 and The bat Whispers from 1930, both of which were directed by Roland West and while some parts of the story are the same to here, the two earlier versions are almost COMPLETELY different.

I agree - I think this is what is called "light entertainment".

Ms Moorhead, most especially, and Mr Price, were quite obviously doing this for laughs. Very funny - Moorhead does an early impresssion of Endora in this movie - just more toned down and much less camp - but like the embryo of Endora!