General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Bats

Bats is a 1999 American horror film directed by Louis Morneau and written by John Logan, in which genetically altered bats attack the residents of a small Texas town and a zoologist and the local sheriff try to stop them.¹ It was produced and distributed by Destination Films, opened in Los Angeles and New York on October 22, 1999, runs 91 minutes, and carries a PG-13 rating.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	October 22, 1999 (theatrical, wide); DVD February 22, 2000²^•³
Director / writer	Louis Morneau / John Logan¹
Principal cast	Lou Diamond Phillips (Sheriff Emmett Kimsey), Dina Meyer (Dr. Sheila Casper), Leon (Jimmy Sands), Bob Gunton (Dr. Alexander McCabe)¹
Format	91 minutes, color, English, MPAA rating PG-13¹
Budget and gross	$5.3 million budget; $10.2 million worldwide gross⁴
Critical scores	19% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (42 reviews); 15% Popcornmeter; Metacritic 23/100²^•⁴
Visual effects	Computer-generated bat swarms by NetterDigital Entertainment, with animatronics for close-ups⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Premise and plot

The story follows Dr. Sheila Casper, a bat zoologist, and her assistant Jimmy Sands, who are called in after swarms of genetically altered bats descend on Gallup, Texas; they work with the local sheriff, Emmett Kimsey, to stop the escalating attacks.²^•⁷ Bob Gunton plays Dr. Alexander McCabe, the scientist responsible for the mutations.¹^•⁶

A plot summary by Stephen Weaver notes that the film opens with an attack on a young couple in a car, establishing from the start that these bats are monsters rather than the sympathetic creatures of more ecological creature films.⁷ In the course of the hunt, the team attaches a tracking device to a bat, which the intelligent swarm kills as soon as it is free; townspeople who ignore warnings to stay indoors are killed, and the heroes have 48 hours to exterminate the bats before the National Guard destroys the town.⁸ Streaming listings describe the setup as a failed government experiment that unleashes a swarm of bloodthirsty bats engineered to feed on human blood.⁹

Production

Destination Films produced and distributed the film, with Brad Jenkel and Louise Rosner as producers and John Logan also serving as executive producer; the crew included cinematographer George Mooradian, editor Glenn Garland, production designer Philip J. C. Duffin, and composer Graeme Revell.¹^•¹⁰ The copyright was registered to Destination Film Distribution Company, Inc. on December 17, 1999.¹

The bats were shown largely with computer images for the massive swarms and animatronics for close-ups.⁶ The CGI bats were created by NetterDigital Entertainment, Inc., a North Hollywood, California company, ahead of the October 22 release.⁵ Although the story is set in West Texas, the film was shot in several locations in Utah.⁸^•⁶

Reception

Critical response. The film fared poorly with critics. Rotten Tomatoes records a 19% Tomatometer from 42 reviews and a 15% audience score, with the critics consensus "Neither scary nor creepy."² Metacritic lists a score of 23 out of 100, and IMDb users have rated it 4.1 out of 10.⁴ Reviewers singled out the effects: Chuck Klosterman of the Akron Beacon Journal called the mechanical bats among the worst movie props in recent history, while Christy Lemire of the Associated Press described the film as too unintentionally funny to be scary; Joe Leydon in Variety, by contrast, called it a vigorously paced and surprisingly satisfying piece of work.²

Box office. Made on a budget of $5.3 million, the film grossed $10.2 million worldwide, about $10.1 million of it in the United States, roughly a 1.9-fold return on its budget.⁴^•²

Contemporary press. The Houston Chronicle's Bruce Westbrook placed the film in the tradition of 1970s drive-in swarm pictures such as Frogs, Squirm, The Swarm, and Kingdom of the Spiders, and judged it an indie effort with reasonably high production values and a solid cast, though he noted that bat attacks were shot with rapid, shaky camera pans and heavy cutting to reduce gore and evoke chaos.⁶ The Science Fiction Encyclopedia wrote that the film follows its genre's beat while keeping enough unexpected moments to avoid being entirely predictable, and remains unpretentiously entertaining despite shaky scripting and camerawork that sometimes masks the bat puppets.¹¹

Place in the creature-feature genre

Commentators group Bats with the late-1990s wave of animal-attack horror that included Anaconda (1997) and Deep Blue Sea (1999), a revival of the 1970s revenge-of-nature subgenre aided by new computer-generated imagery.¹² A doctoral thesis on horror and the Anthropocene notes that the trade press compared it to Nightwing (1979), Piranha, and Lake Placid, and that Sight and Sound described it as sticking to the ground rules of its genre.¹³ A 2025 retrospective argued that in 1999 even smaller horror films received wide theatrical releases, whereas a film like Bats would likely go straight to a streaming service today.¹⁴

A direct-to-video sequel, Bats: Human Harvest, followed in 2007.³ The original film remains widely available: as of late 2026 it streams on Amazon Prime Video and, free with ads, on The Roku Channel, Pluto TV, YouTube, Plex, and Tubi, with digital rentals from $3.99 and purchases from $12.99.¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Horror films (individual works) › Monster and creature films

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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