The Phantom Creeps is a 1939 12-chapter science fiction horror serial starring Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Doctor Zorka, who attempts to rule the world by creating various elaborate inventions. In dramatic fashion, foreign agents and G-Men try to seize the inventions for themselves.

Plot

Dr. Zorka is a rogue scientist and the inventor of various weapons, including a "devisualizer" belt that can render him invisible, an eight-foot slave robot (Ed Wolff), and robot spiders that can either paralyze or outright destroy their prey. He also has a deadly meteorite fragment from which he extracts an element that can induce suspended animation in an entire army. Foreign spies, operating under the guise of a foreign language school, are trying to acquire the meteorite element by any means necessary while Zorka's former partner, Dr. Fred Mallory, irritated that Zorka will not turn his inventions over to the United States government, alerts Capt. Bob West of the Military Intelligence Department. Tired of answering the door and saying no to the spies and the government, Zorka relocates his laboratory. When his beloved wife is killed, Zorka (who'd been puttering around the lab for his own amusement) is crushed and swears eternal vengeance against anyone trying to use his creations. Dr. Zorka also has aspirations of world domination, and he would have it, too, if not for his assistant Monk, an escaped convict whom Zorka has virtually enslaved. Monk is cowardly, treacherous, and totally incompetent, but his accidental or deliberate interference repeatedly frustrates Dr. Zorka's plans...