In case you haven’t heard, today is National Flashlight Day. We here at Movie Morlocks are celebrating this wholly unnecessary but entirely welcome new holiday with reminders of how useful flashlights have been in films since their invention in 1896. When Joshua Lionel Cowen (later the inventor of the toy train and founder of Lionel Trains) passed the American Eveready Battery Company to new owner Conrad Hubert, he also passed along his notes for a battery-powered illuminated tube to light up potted plants. Hubert and Eveready employee David Misall perfected this design into what we now recognize as a flashlight, which they patented in 1899. That year, Eveready announced its new invention on the cover of its catalogue with the Biblical quotation “Let there be light.”¹

Flashlights were a godsend for characters in horror, suspense and crime films, who formerly had to conduct their investigations by candle light or kerosene lantern. (Gothic heroines must have heaved a bosomy sigh of relief not to have to port weighty candelabras up and down the cold stone stairs of their haunted villas.) There is something entirely cinematic about the way the beam of a flashlight cuts the darkness, its light describing a ray similar to that of a motion picture projector.² Although not necessarily true for anyone born, say, after 1970, most of us probably played with flashlights (or read whole books by them, as I did, after lights out) before we ever saw our first projected movie.

My favorite flashlight scenes? There are, of course, far too many to list, but I’ll mention a few. I love the way the circle of light bouncing off the walls of Dracula’s (rented) castle is so badly matched to Lou Costello’s prop flashlight in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1946) and Frances Dee and Edith Barrett’s flashlit “Lewton walk” through the cane fields in I Walked with a Zombie (1943). It’s always impressed me how Tippi Hedren refuses to drop her flashlight at the end of The Birds (1964) even while she’s being pecked to death. A flashlight adds creepiness to a key scene in The Exorcist (1973) and who could forget the underwater flashlight that reveals Ben Gardner’s free-floating head in Jaws (1975)? Without flashlights, gumshoes couldn't sleuth, final girls couldn't survive, and dead bodies would just look, well… lifeless.³

The best ever flashlight movie, though, has to be Jack Arnold’s underrated The Mole People (1956), in which archeologists John Agar, Hugh Beaumont and Nestor Paiva stumble upon a subterranean race of albino Sumerians and their mutant slaves. What’s great about this movie is that it makes the heroes’ flashlight an actual weapon, whose illumination is more than the undergrounders can stand. Of course, once evil High Priest (is there any other kind) Alan Napier gets his hands on “the burning light,” he thinks he has it made… until his batteries fail during the climactic mutant siege. Oh, the look on his face! The Mole People made me want to keep a flashlight handy at all times, just in case. And I have, ever since.

Flashlights bring light to darkness, dispel shadows and comfort us by allowing us to see what we should not be able to see… and in this way they also pile discomfort upon relief by bringing us face to face with the source of our fears. Dramatically, you couldn't ask for more. Whatever your favorite flashlight movie or scene, light 'em up this National Flashlight Day.

Notes:

1. Flashlights were so named because early batteries were so weak that one couldn’t maintain a steady beam of light, requiring the operator to flash them on and off during operation.
2. The Edison Company’s Vitascope, the first commercially viable movie projector, received its patent the year the flashlight was invented.
3. I'm an old school kind of guy and even though I dig the modern MagLite style of flashlight popularized by serial killer movies and forensic detective shows, I'll always have a soft spotlight in my heart for the old fashioned flashlights, with the lamps as big as car headlights.