For decades, Bat Pussy existed almost like a cinematic ghost: no reliable credits, no copyright record, no identified director, and no confirmed cast. Its afterlife began in the mid-1990s, when Memphis filmmaker and musician Mike McCarthy discovered roughly 200 boxes of vintage Super 8 and 16mm pornography and loops in the back room of the Paris adult movie theater. Among the forgotten material was a 600-foot 16mm reel labeled simply “BATPUSSY.” McCarthy contacted Mike Vraney, founder of the exploitation distributor Something Weird Video, who purchased the entire theater collection for only $1,000. The film was subsequently issued on VHS in 1996, allowing an anonymous regional sexploitation oddity to become a notorious cult object. Its obscurity was so complete that even the theatrical introduction attached to the home-video release could not establish that Bat Pussy had actually played at the theater named in the introduction. The surviving print was later restored in 2K by the American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird, premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September 2017, and received a Blu-ray release the following month. In 2019, a second 16mm copy was found containing footage missing from the earlier ending, prompting another preservation and a revised Blu-ray release in 2022.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1990s
The 600-Foot Reel Found Behind a Memphis Adult Theater
Bat Pussy / 1990s
For decades, Bat Pussy existed almost like a cinematic ghost: no reliable credits, no copyright record, no identified director, and no confirmed cast. Its afterlife began in the mid-1990s, when Memphis filmmaker and musician Mike McCarthy discovered roughly 200 boxes of vintage Super 8 and 16mm pornography and loops in the back room of the Paris adult movie theater. Among the forgotten material was a 600-foot 16mm reel labeled simply “BATPUSSY.” McCarthy contacted Mike Vraney, founder of the exploitation distributor Something Weird Video, who purchased the entire theater collection for only $1,000. The film was subsequently issued on VHS in 1996, allowing an anonymous regional sexploitation oddity to become a notorious cult object. Its obscurity was so complete that even the theatrical introduction attached to the home-video release could not establish that Bat Pussy had actually played at the theater named in the introduction. The surviving print was later restored in 2K by the American Genre Film Archive and Something Weird, premiered at Fantastic Fest in Austin in September 2017, and received a Blu-ray release the following month. In 2019, a second 16mm copy was found containing footage missing from the earlier ending, prompting another preservation and a revised Blu-ray release in 2022.
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