Bat out of Hell
"For something is amiss or out of placeBats are creepy for many people. They often seem rats with wings to us, they are thought to spread rabies, and apparently like to hang out in all sorts of dark, foreboding places (caves, bell towers, abandoned houses, castles, crypts, etc). Three species (out of over 1,000!) are infamous for drinking blood, and have led to a strong association between bats and vampires. As such, bats frequently show up as antagonists in horror themed media. Can be roughly divided into a few types:
When mice with wings can wear a human face."
When mice with wings can wear a human face."
— Theodore Roethke, "The Bat"
- Normal bats: Frequently depicted as The Swarm; a shrieking mass of menacing wings, regardless of whether or not they pose any actual danger to the cast.
- Dire bats: Larger and more vicious than normal bats, and menacing even without The Swarm to back them up.
- Werebats: Monstrous, anthropomorphic creatures with a mixture of bat and human features.
- Robo bats: Robotic bats.
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Anime and Manga
- The Chiropterans in Blood+ take the vampire/bat comparison and run with it (check out the name). Even the humanoid chiropterans get batlike features when they go One-Winged Angel.
- Ulquiorra Schiffer from Bleach is one of these.
- In Yaiba, the strongest of the Hakki is the Batman (or Bat-Guy in the anime). See also Our Vampires Are Different.
- Minor demon Blackie in Wedding Peach is a bat.
- Both played straight and inverted in one episode of the popular children's anime series, Dogtato, where a bat/apple hybrid visits the Veggie residents. Although sweet and kind in the day, during the night the bat/apple gets a Split Personality Takeover that causes it to bite all the veggie-hybrids, turning them into apples that roll up and gather together in the branches of a nearby apple tree where the bat holds residence. They return to normal in the morning.
- One of Fabian's devils in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Vivid is a cartoony looking bat that could grow greatly in size and subsequently shrink any unfortunate mage that it swallows whole.
- The Autumnlands: Tooth & Claw has a tribe of human-sized warrior bats.
- Batman chose the bat as his symbol due to its fear-inducing properties (because bats specifically scared him as a child, and/or the superstitious nature of criminals in general). One of his villains, Man-Bat, is a Were Bat.
- The Batcave is appropriately named, not only because of its owner but for the many, many bats that live down there. Gotta wonder how Batman keeps the place clean with one butler...
- Not to mention the stink!
- Simple. He's Batman.
- His 'Heroic Brutality' in Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe is attaching a sonic device to his foe's chest that attracts a swarm of bats to torment them.
Thanagarian: Your weapons are pitiful!
- He also does this to some Thanagarian mooks in Justice League when they attack the Batcave.
Batman: Wait for it...
- He did the same to a large crowd in broad daylight as early as Batman: Year One.
- There's also Batman/Dracula: Red Rain, in which Batman becomes Vampire Batman.
- The Batcave is appropriately named, not only because of its owner but for the many, many bats that live down there. Gotta wonder how Batman keeps the place clean with one butler...
- The Marvel Comics version of Dracula could transform himself into a giant bat, or a bat/human hybrid.
- Marvel also has Batwing, who mainly showed up in Untold Tales of Spider-Man. A Man-Bat homage by Kurt Busiek.
Films — Animated
- FernGully: The Last Rainforest: Batty the giant bat was actually a normal bat who just looks huge in comparison to fairies. He's also friendly, if a little addled.
- Averted in the 1997 film, Anastasia. Bartok the albino bat objects to his master's heinous acts, and gets beaten up by demonic insects. He got his own sequel called Bartok the Magnificent.
- The Boggans' favorite mammals in Epic.
- Ratigan's henchman Fidget in The Great Mouse Detective.
- Inverted for some viewers of Fantasia: Viewing Chernabog as a Big Bat may serve as Nightmare Retardant.
Films — Live-Action
- Dracula and his wives in Van Helsing can turn into a werebat. Their children were also bat creatures.
- Marcus Corvinus of the Underworld series is the very first vampire, and significantly more bat-like than every other vampire. However, this is only after his corpse ingests Lycan blood, and his becoming a hybrid was overridden by his vampire genes, making him able to change into a batlike form.
- Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) features a cave of Dire Bats. Technically, A Natural History of Skull Island identifies these creatures as winged carnivorous rodents, not true bats. Their looks still play off the killer-bat-from-hell trope, however.
- The giant bats in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom were actually real bats — but not vampire bats, contrary to what Indy says.
- Many large bats in Real Life have been saddled with taxonomic names containing vampire references, so Indy might well have been misled by this.
- Or he was just trying to screw with Willy. Just listen to his voice when he says that line.
- Ace Ventura: Ace loves all animals... except bats, which he fears and loathes. "DIE, DEVIL BIRD!!!" "TAKE THAT, YOU WINGED SPAWN OF SATAN!!!" (No, it's not that the bats are actually creepy, but hell, his reaction is hilarious.)
- A giant bat steals Jeff Portnoy's bag of "jellybeans" (actually cocaine) in Tropic Thunder.
- In the 1999 horror film Bats, people start to die in a small Texas town and the prime suspects are bats. A specialist in bats is called in, and reveals that the bats have been engineered to be become a deadly human-hunting cooperative.
- A Direct-To-TV sequel to this film, Bats: Human Harvest, was made by the Sci Fi Channel in 2007.
- The "crystal bats" in The Dark Crystal.
- Turned around in the Argentine computer animated movie Plumiferos (free birds). Clarita the bat frightens Feifi the sparrow at first during her new life of freedom out of her cage, but the misunderstanding is cleared up and they become good friends.
- The Creeper is Invoked as this in Jeepers Creepers 2.
- The rat-bat-spider creature in 1960 Sci-Fi film The Angry Red Planet.
- The Gyaos from the Gamera films are giant man-eating bats. It should be noted, however, that the Heisei Gamera films refer to them as genetically engineered birds, despite retaining bat-like ears and wings.
- One of the more prominent threats in the Monster Mash climax of The Cabin in the Woods is a tiger-sized batlike predator, listed on the betting board as a "dragonbat".
- In the film Daybreakers, a virus which started in bats caused some of the human population to become vampires, eventually resulting in 95% of the human population becoming vampires. These vampires cannot transform into bats, but, if deprived of blood, they become batlike, animalistic creatures.
- A deleted scene in Batman Forever has Bruce Wayne confront a giant bat in a secret, hidden chamber in the Batcave. which showed up in the trailers.
- The Dark Knight Saga (being a reappropriation of the most iconic elements of the Batman mythos) milks this trope for most of its worth, most especially in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises. Notably averted in The Dark Knight though, as it's the first Batman film not to feature any bats (either live-action or CG).
- The 1979 horror film Nightwing has a swarm of killer plague infected vampire bats summoned by a vengeful Native American shaman.
- In The Abominable Dr. Phibes, one of the not-so-good Doctor's methods of execution is releasing a swarm of bats to nibble their victim to death. However, the flying foxes shown in the movie are fairly docile and prefer fruit and nectar to humans. And they're kind of cute, too.
- Stephen King's Graveyard Shift has giant bats that actually are mutant rats.
- The King Bats in The Princess Bride novel. They're one of the few things of which Fezzik is actually afraid.
- Subverted in Spellsinger, where Pog the bat (oversized and intelligent, like nearly all animals in that world) is one of the nicer characters in the series.
- Completely subverted (and also played straight, if you think about it) in Silverwing - the protagonists are bats. The story is about bats. Bats are the good guys, with birds and land mammals (the traditional heroes) as villains or at least bad-tempered (with a few exceptions). Granted, the main villain is also a bat...
- However, in the third book, Firewing Griffin and Luna are literally bats out of Hell.
- The pair of giant mutant bats in Vespers. They are also accompanied by huge swarms of normal bats, which are driven to attack by the influence of the giants.
- Oddly averted in Redwall, which normally plays "good" and "evil" animal stereotypes straight. Mossflower's bats are perfectly nice, help the heroes, and speak with an odd nervous tic, nervous tic, nervous tic... This is explained by Word of God as the bats having spent their entire lives listening to their voices echo in the caves they live in, so now they provide their own echo.
- Averted in the children's book Stellaluna.
- Subverted in Animorphs when the team morphs bats in The Android. Later Rachel gets a bat as her cover morph in The Underground.
- The Red Court vampires of The Dresden Files universe are large, slimy bat-creatures who hide behind idealised human flesh-masks.
- Averted in The Underland Chronicles. As the bats are the humans' most valuable allies.
- Lois McMaster Bujold's fantasy series The Sharing Knife features "malices" which create monstrous servants by magically twisting animals into more-or-less human bodies, with at least some semblance of human intelligence. In Horizon (the fourth and so far final book of the series) a malice gets hold of an enormous cave-ful of bats (one character notes there are millions of bats in some of the caves in that region) and winds up creating a flying army of creatures somewhere between "Dire Bats" and "Were Bats", while the malice itself takes the form of an especially large and eerily beautiful Were Bat.
- In After Man: A Zoology of the Future, an island-chain that emerged after humans' extinction happened to be reached by bats before birds, and they came to dominate its ecosystems. Bat-descended animals found there include seal-like surfbats, flightless bug-eaters that imitate flowers, and bizarre shrieking predators called "nightstalkers" that walk on their front limbs and claw with their back ones.
- In Elfstones Of Shannara, The Dagda Mor mounts one of these for his final confrontation with the Roc-mounted Allanon.
- Chiro from Nightsong, another children's book, is a subversion, being a cute young bat.
- James Bond in Nobody Lives for Ever is attacked by a hybrid giant vampire bat in a hotel bathroom. Its threat comes from the possible diseases it may carry and after killing it, Bond scrubs the bathroom with antiseptics so that no trace of said diseases are left behind.
- In The Reynard Cycle, bats are generally considered to be creatures of The Watcher, the god of death, and are thus generally considered an ill omen. In The Baron of Maleperduys, Hermeline recalls that the castle of Maleperduys had to be cleared of a swarm of them before Reynard and companions could call it home.
- Dark Shadows. The witch Angelique Bouchard summoned a vampire bat (presumably from Hell) to transform the wealthy Barnabas Collins (her former lover who broke her heart to marry her employer) into a vampire, leading to the town's pursuit of him.
- Gilligan's Island episode "Up At Bat". Gilligan is bitten by a large, nasty looking bat and thinks he's turning into a vampire.
- The Future Predators, Primeval's answer to the Daleks, are highly evolved flightless bats.
- Appearently inspired on the flightless bats of After Man: A Zoology of the Future.
- The Rani's Tetrap Mooks in the Doctor Who serial "Time and the Rani" from the Seventh Doctor's tenure are large vampire bat-like creatures.
- Blackwing, Advent Beast of Len, aka Kamen Rider Wing Knight, is a rare good example as it serves one of the good guys there.
- His Japanese counterpart Ren, aka Kamen Rider Knight has Darkwing, due to them being the original versions of the characters on which Len and Blackwing are based. Darkwing is also a good guy, though this seems to be more out of loyalty to Ren than anything else.
- In one episode of The Office, a bat winds up loose in the titular office. Jim, playing to Dwight's usual Genre Blindness, convinces him that he was bitten and is turning into a vampire.
- An episode of Married... with Children has a throw-away gag where Peg opens one of the cabinets in the family's kitchen to reveal a mass of cobwebs and a large bat flapping around. She wisely just closes it again.
- Very large bats called "deathgleaners" appear in The Future Is Wild, and are creepy-looking predators and scavengers.
- Power Rangers Megaforce has "Zombats", cyborg creatures used to make monsters grow. They have black, serpentine bodies which end in blades and a single large eye for a head.
- The Murcielago from NBC's Grimm are bat-like Wesen with the ability to emit a screech that can rupture windows, lungs, ear-drums and eyes.
- In the Doctor Who story "State of Decay", Aukon commands a swarm of blood-sucking bats.
- The album trilogy of the same name by Meat Loaf surely deserves a mention. All three albums include cover art of a demonic bat (perhaps Satan in a beast form) in a hellish background and a muscle bound hero on a magic flying motorcycle. The animated video for "The Monster's Loose" brings all three album covers together by telling the story of the man with the motorcycle who rescues his (literally) angelic girlfriend from a giant bat. She narrowly escapes Damsel in Distress territory by saving him herself at one point.
- The Camazotz of Mayan mythology was a bat-god associated with night, death and sacrifice. The name literally translates as "death bat". In the Popol Vuh, Camazotz are the bat-like monsters encountered by the Mayan Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque during their trials in the underworld of Xibalba. The twins had to spend the night in the House of Bats where they squeeze themselves into their own blowguns in order to defend themselves. When Hunahpu stuck his head out of his blowgun to see if the sun had risen, Camazotz immediately snatched off his head and carried it to the ballcourt to be hung up as the ball to be used by the gods in their next ballgame.
- The "Moon-Hoax", a series of fake articles published in the New York Sun in the mid-19th century, convinced gullible readers that a new kind of telescope had revealed life forms on the moon's surface. At the climax of the series, a race of intelligent bat-people were "sighted", and subverted this trope by being peaceful vegetarians.
- Mortasheen has three, created by vampires to protect their larder of humans. There's Bullysnag, a gorilla like bat that is trained to always go for the kneecaps when hunting, Clawsimon, a spotlight-like bat designed to stop escaping humans, and Chiraptor, who is the vampire equivalent of a hunting falcon. The actual bat vampire, Sinister, as it prefers to be left alone amongst its hordes of mind-controlled bats.
- Vampire Counts from Warhammer have several bat units, including Bat Swarms (regular bat), Fell Bats (bigger bats), and Varghulfs (frickin' huge bat-like vampire monsters!). Winged Vampire Lords and Strigoi are more monstrous vampires with bat-like characteristics.
- Dire bats, from Dungeons & Dragons.
- The Eyewing combines bat wings with a Faceless Eye.
- Several magical species of giant bat are found in the Forgotten Realms.
- Subverted by D&D 3E's desmodu, bat-like subterranean humanoids which are actually the good guys.
- Two of the minor domain lords in the Ravenloft setting are werebats.
- The mobat is basically a dire bat, only smart, with a spike on its tail.
- Giant bats in Basic D&D are the size of hawks, and about 10% are giant vampire bats with a paralytic bite.
- Averted in Werewolf: The Apocalypse. Of all the various breeds that exist, including spiders, sharks and dinosaurs, the werebats are not one of them, having been wiped out several centuries ago. Werewolf: The Forsaken, however, allows them in the form of "skinchangers".
- Mind you, the reason the Camazotz (the werebats) got eliminated in the first place is because the Shadow Lords who were part of the expeditions to South America fell prey to this trope. While the Camazotz served as Gaia's nocturnal messengers (not unlike the Corax, or wereravens), the Shadow Lords pointed out that anything with a shape like that had to be in thrall to the Wyrm (they weren't, as it happened). With the South American Camazotz wiped out, Bat, their totem, ended up falling to the Wyrm, dooming the surviving Australian Camazotz as their creation ritual became corrupted. The Shadow Lords have been trying to make up for that fuckup ever since and have even managed to free an aspect of Bat from the Wyrm's grip... but the Camazotz are still dead.
- In Rocket Age Martian Devil Vultures are Type 2s, being hairless wolf sized creatures with four grasping limbs and two wings. They're intelligent enough to make dead-fall traps.
- One of the trails in Disney's Animal Kingdom lets you bypass the bat exhibit — the bats alone among all the other animals. For perspective, this is the trail that walks you right by a KOMODO DRAGON without a similar warning. The bats, unlike the Komodo dragon, are in a small dark room, and going back out into the bright light can be disorienting, even if you don't have any fear of bats themselves.
- In World of Warcraft, one quest has you kill a giant bat named Duskwing. Giant bats are common in lots of places, and some are used as flying mounts.
- The Forsaken and the Darkspear Trolls seem to have a particular affinity for bats, as their flight routes use them instead of the wyverns that the rest of the Horde prefers. They even use bats as bomber planes and Troll Druids transform into bats as their Flight Form instead of the usual birds that other Druid races use.
- Zubat and its evolutions in the Pokémon series, which are also literal Goddamned Bats.
- Gligar and Gliscor appear to be a a cross between a bat and a scorpion. Funnily enough, the anime used Gligar rather than Zubat for its Batman parody.
- Woobat and Swoobat are subversions. In the games, Swoobat gives off ultrasonic waves that actually put people in a better mood.
- Pokémon X and Y introduce Noivern, a bat crossed with a dragon!
- The pure blood vampires in Bloodrayne are werebats.
- A giant bat is a classic boss monster in Castlevania. It was, after all, the first boss monster at the end of level one for the first game.
- Castlevania also had the werebat form for Dracula in a few of the games.
- Then there's the bat swarm boss in Dawn of Sorrow.
- Subverted and played straight in Symphony of the Night. The bats which attack you near the beginning are fairly weak enemies (ironically, the game has Goddamned Bats in many areas, but the actual bats aren't among them), and the giant bat boss appears, though it isn't a very strong boss. On the other hand, Alucard has a bat form (which you have to use to fully explore several areas and obtain various special items), and a bat familiar he can summon; bat-form Alucard can attack enemies with fireballs and sonar waves.
- Castlevania also had the werebat form for Dracula in a few of the games.
- NetHack, despite its deserved reputation, is another game that features bats who are fairly weak enemies. The offshoot Slash'EM includes some more deadly varieties.
- Resident Evil 0 had Billy and Rebbecca fight a giant bat and for bonus points it was in a church/graveyard.
- Resident Evil 5 also had some kind of giant bat/insect creature as the boss for the second mission.
- Castle Crashers had the ridiculously huge vampire bat, Pipistrello.
- Vespertillo Canor and Pteropus Canor from The World Ends with You.
- Sa Ga Frontier has a Bonus Boss in the form of the Abyss Bat.
- A sort of Dire Bat exists in Final Fantasy XI, but they don't really swarm. The normal, small bats do, however: three small bats are actually considered one monster.
- The Winged Twilights from The Elder Scrolls are basically female were-bats.
- Nexus War has the Revenant class, which can summon a swarm of bats as a pet, turn into a small bat for faster travel, or turn into a werebat for increased strength and the ability to see invisible characters with echolocation.
- The Keese from The Legend of Zelda are pretty average sized... but can light themselves on fire! ...Or ice!
- Vampires in AdventureQuest normally turn into Werebats, and more powerful Vampires are always Werebats (except the queen). Werepyres are part wolf, part bat, but they look more like a bat than a wolf.
- The Mario series has a lot of giant bat type enemies (Swoopers, Swampires, Swoopulas, Fangs, etc), most being roughly Mario or playable character sized and in some cases, annoying as they either swoop down or drain Mario's health. Antasma, the primary villain of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team, is an anthropomorphic one, and is known as "the Bat King".
- Similarly, the Wario Land series has various kinds of creepy bats, from the annoying flying bomb-shaped bats which explode after attaching themselves to Wario, the bats in Wario Land 4 which turn him into a vampire just by touching him, the ones in Shake It which just swarm him, and whatever the heck Catbat is actually meant to be (some kind of flying cat thing with bat wings for ears, a mechanical bat head on it's head, that floats like a ghost).
- Battle for Wesnoth's Vampire Bat line. Which are, handily enough, also Goddamned Bats.
- Somewhat subverted with Sonic the Hedgehog character Rouge the Bat. She's a Classy Cat-Burglar (with rather improbable goals) and generally on the evil side (especially in spinoffs), but closer to True Neutral and often acting as an Anti-Hero. Shes a lot more like a real bat than usual, much like Korbat.
- Played straighter with Ixis Naugus, although he's one-third bat, one-third rhino, and one third lobster. Yikes.
- Classic enemy Bat Brain.
- Darksiders features not only enemy bats (occasionally fire breathing or using sound attacks), but also their mommy: Super-sized bat demon Tiamat.
- Riviera: The Promised Land featured three bats... as weapons! You catch them and use them against your enemies. However they are also known to have a chance of rebellion, unless Serene uses them. Serene herself also works with the iconography, bat wings and a large scythe like the grim reaper.
- In the very early computer game Hunt The Wumpus, a giant bat can swoop down and carry the player to a new location in the Wumpus's cave.
- In Afterlife, one of the disasters that can attack the Fire and Brimstone Hell are Bats out of Hell, a swarm of bats who defecate on buildings.
- One level of Dragons Lair has a swarm of bats, as well as a Dire bat.
- Donkey Kong Country Returns gives us the Squeeklies, which combine this trope with Goddamned Bats and take them both Up to Eleven. They are one of the major reasons the cave world is so reviled, particularly Crowded Cavern, which is chock full of 'em. There's even a giant Squeekly that's as tall as the screen (DK is only about an 8th as tall by comparison), whose sonic beams are THE one reason why the "Crowded Cavern" level is SO. FREAKING. HARD.
- A bat enemy by the name of Mr. Batty is a recurring mook throughout the MOTHER trilogy. They seem to be more Played for Laughs, especially considering its battle theme in MOTHER 3 does a Suspiciously Similar Song version of the 60s Batman theme...
- Viva Pinata manages to invoke this with one of the wild and destructive sour pinatas. While sour it looks like a horror movie bat and makes other pinatas sick with its bite. Once you cure it (with garlic) it becomes... A rabbit-like thing with hilariously tiny wings.
- Several of the Might and Magic games have enemy bats. They are not particularly dangerous, but they are rather unfriendly (and in Might & Magic VII, the most dangerous variant can attack you with fire).
- The bats in the Trophy Room in Brain Dead 13. Somewhat downplayed when one of them (a giant bat) wraps around Lance and starts playfully chewing on his head while Lance gets a slightly irritated look, in one scene that is less of a death scene and more of a cutesy mosquito bite scene.
- Both played straight and averted by the Komory Bat dream eater in Kingdom Hearts 3D. The creepy red eyes and dark colors their evil Nightmare versions possess give them a rather unsettling appearance, and they're the other kind of bat as well. On the other hand, the brightly colored friendly Spirit version is adorable and a surprisingly helpful ally in combat despite being one of the two starter dream eaters.
- The Demons, large, flying surface predators in Metro 2033, allegedly evolved from tigers, though they resemble bats more than anything else.
- The Adventures Of Massmouth has the Stuka-Bats, inhabiting Abandoned Mines on the planet Nemo. They are frighteningly fast and vicious, and their bizarre, scary screams don't help.
- Solidly averted by the bats in Minecraft, which are completely harmless and incapable of attacking the player.
- Terraria has many varieties of bats that all attack the player. Including literal bats out of hell in the game's Underworld.
- Dark Dizzy/Dark Necrobat from Mega Man X5.
- On Neopets, Korbats are, in general, very cute. This makes them more like Real Life bats than usual!
- It's also played with in the case of the most prominent character who happens to be a Korbat, Lord Darigan. Introduced as the apparent Big Bad in the Champions of Meridell plot, we later learn that he and his people were victimized by the supposed "heroes", Meridell, when they stole the Orb, and cast a curse on them, despite Darigan's kingdom being pacifistic. Despite looking like a mixture of Man-Bat and a lich, Lord Darigan and his people are merely fighting to reclaim what is rightfully theirs. Although they won the war, a Diabolus Ex Machina ended with Darigan going Brainwashed and Crazy when the orb failed to work. Not only did King Skarl get away scot-free and earned a position in the Gallery of Heroes while Darigan was placed in the Gallery of Evil, Darigan's successor, Lord Kass, was far more monstrous. Fortunately, Lord Darigan returned from the dead and saved Meridell, forgiving them and trying to usher in a new era of peace. And yet Darigan's still in the Gallery of Evil with Kass and the like.
- Gaia Online's vampires can turn into bat swarms according to the comics and single bats according to the vampire-themed items. The ones that appear in zOMG! have bat wings, but don't transform.
- zOMG! also has the bat-winged Clutch and Purse Animated, though they're not the worst of the Animated in Deadman's Pass.
- Transformers: Ratbat, one of Soundwave's cassettes, turns into a bat (as his name belies). In the comics he was obsessed with using Energon efficiently. Decepticon hypnotist Mindwipe falls into this well complete with Hungarian Accent.
- Giant Bat of Godzilla: The Series, a Kaiju-sized monster bat.
- Subverted in the Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Good Times, Bat Times": Yes, Foxglove is a bat. And yes, she is a witch's familiar. But no, she is anything but horrifying. Instead, she is a cute and lovable bat the size of a chipmunk and in love with Dale.
- The Emperor's New Groove: When Kuzco and Pacha are attempting to climb out of the chasm they have fallen into, Kuzco (as a llama) rams his mouth and nose into a small cave opening, which is of course revealed to be full of bats. The bats all immediately attempt to flee, leading to... blech!
- The ThunderCats (2011) version of Mumm-Ra is a type three bat humanoid, complete with leaf-nosed snout, gaining bat wings in his One-Winged Angel form.
- Completely averted in one episode of The Wild Thornberrys, where vampire bats are rightly shown as flighty and timid of Eliza and Darwin.
- Averted in "The Brave Little Bat", a Merrie Melodies short directed by Chuck Jones and featuring Sniffles. Batty, the titular character, briefly looks scary in the shadows. When he walks into the light, he's a chatty, cute little guy who looks like Sniffles, but with pointier ears. He also wears Dutch wooden shoes and a Chico Marx hat.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has a few varieties of bats. Normal bats, though "dark and mysterious", are perfectly viable pets, and Fruit Bats (literally bats with fruit-like features) are entirely harmless, though inconveniently ravenous at times – a flock may chew on your fruit salad hat if you're not careful. Both kinds aren't any less cute than any other small animal in the series. Vampire bats are larger and have a more frightening appearance and don't stay in only a section of the orchard, though they're still not malicious. However, "Bats!" gave us Flutterbat, a bat-pony with a thirst for apples.
- Wolf-bats from Avatar: The Last Airbender. It's a vampire bat mixed with the legs, paws, and tail of a wolf!
- Completely subverted by fruit bats. If not for their wings, they look like tiny, wide-eyed foxes. To add a little extra "AWWWWWW", fruit bats love being cuddled and their favorite snack is banana smoothies!
- Subverted by the noble Spacebat.
- Spectral Bats, who have 3-foot long wingspans and are the largest carnivorous bat alive, will eat anything smaller than it and will hunt other bats as well. Except that bats with offspring are very good mothers and fathers. The male will even sleep with the mother and young in his wings.
- Real vampire bats avert this trope through their altruistic social behavior. Bats who come home with full bellies will regurgitate blood to feed hungry flockmates, even when the recipients aren't related to them.
- There was, during the Pleistocene, a species of giant vampire bat Desmodus draculae. They were roughly one and a half times as large as a modern vampire bat, or the size of a smallish fruit bat.
- On the other hand they can be considered as pest as they can carry rabies.
- Ordinary insectivorous bats can likewise be vectors for rabies. The odds of any given bat being a carrier are low, but rabid bats eventually lose their ability to fly due to neurological degeneration, greatly increasing the risk that a predator or unwary human will investigate the grounded bat and get bitten for their trouble.
- An American dentist investigated the possibility of rigging bats with tiny explosive charges, to be carried into the rafters of Japanese buildings in World War II. The bat-bombs were never deployed, and a Disastrous Demonstration resulted in some escaped bats blowing up the researcher's own workshops.
- In Spain, bats were believed to be a sign of good fortune, and this belief traveled over to the New World. When Dona Amalia (the wife of one of the founders of Bacardi) saw leaf-nosed fruit bats roosting in the original still, she thus interpreted this as a sign that her husband's business venture would be a success, and came up with the idea to use a bat as the company's logo.
- Orang-Bati, a large, cryptid bat that's said to eat babies.
- Subverted with Honduran white bats. They eat mostly fruit and resemble little white puffballs.