On the evening of Sunday, October 25, the nave of Emmanuel Episcopal Church at 501 N. Broadway in Shawnee, Oklahoma, will go dark and a nearly century-old film will flicker to life — not to the sound of a recorded score, but to a church organ played live. The film is "The Bat," a 1926 silent mystery, horror and comedy picture directed by Roland West, and the organist is Dr. Ron Lewis, the church's former music director, assisted by his wife, Jo Lewis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for the 7 p.m. screening. Admission is free, limited only by the church's seating capacity, so the evening is open to anyone who wants to walk in and sit down.
It is the fifth year the parish has staged a silent film for the Halloween season, and the Lewises have been part of every one of them. The earlier programs read like a syllabus of early horror and suspense: "The Phantom of the Opera," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," "Nosferatu," and "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Each of those films arrived in the world before synchronized sound was standard, which means each one left room — a great deal of room — for a musician to decide, moment by moment, what the audience should feel. That is the draw of the format. A silent film with live accompaniment is not a recording played back; it is a performance that exists only in the room where it happens, and only for the people in the seats.
"The Bat" is a fitting choice for a church nave in late October, in part because it began on the stage. The film adapts a 1920 Broadway play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, a three-act mystery-comedy in which Cornelia Van Gorder and her guests spend a stormy night in a rented summer house hunting for stolen money they believe is hidden somewhere inside, while a masked criminal called the Bat stalks them through the dark. The play itself grew out of Rinehart's 1908 mystery novel "The Circular Staircase"; she and Hopwood reworked the story for the stage and added the Bat as its titular villain. After previewing under the title "A Thief in the Night," it opened at the Morosco Theatre on August 23, 1920, and became a phenomenon — 867 performances in New York and 327 in London, with road companies carrying it to other cities, and Broadway revivals in 1937 and 1953. The connection to the earlier novel even produced a legal fight over film rights with the Selig Polyscope Company, which had made a 1915 adaptation of "The Circular Staircase."
Roland West's 1926 film, released by United Artists with Arthur Edeson as cinematographer, arrived at the height of the play's popularity and was a major box-office success. Its reputation rests on its visuals and atmosphere — the shadowed mansion, the secret passages, the flitting figure of the Bat — and on its willingness to mix genuine suspense with light comedy. The plot sends the Bat to a country mansion built by Courtleigh Fleming, the recently deceased president of the Oakdale Bank, where the house has been rented for the summer by the writer Cornelia Van Gorder. Her maid sets a bear trap to catch the intruder; a bank cashier has vanished with $200,000; and the mansion fills with spooky characters and clever twists before the Bat's identity is finally revealed.
West was not finished with the material. In 1930 he remade it as "The Bat Whispers," an early talkie shot in the 65mm Magnifilm process — one of the first widescreen films, and a production whose cinematography West helped finance himself. A third adaptation followed in 1959, starring Vincent Price. The story's reach extends further still: the play and its film adaptations are often cited among the influences on the creation of Batman, a connection that gives a 1926 masked figure in a cape a surprisingly long afterlife.
For Shawnee, though, the appeal is simpler and more local. A silent film in a church nave is a particular kind of evening: the building's own acoustics, an organ capable of everything from a whisper to a shriek, and a story that asks the audience to lean in rather than sit back. The Lewises' run of Halloween screenings has made the format a small tradition at Emmanuel — one that depends on a musician willing to improvise a two-hour score in real time, and on a parish willing to open its doors to the neighborhood for free.
Emmanuel Episcopal Church sits at the corner of Broadway and Highland in Shawnee. Parking is available directly behind the church to the east, and across the street to the west on Broadway. The screening begins at 7 p.m. on Sunday, October 25, with doors opening at 6:30 p.m. There is no ticket to buy; seating is first come, first served, up to capacity. For anyone who has wondered what the movies sounded like before they had a soundtrack — or who simply wants a Halloween-season evening that is a little strange and a little beautiful — the answer will be echoing off the walls of a church in Shawnee.