The Phantom Creeps is a 1939 serial about a mad scientist, Doctor Zorks (Béla Lugosi), who attempts to rule the world with his inventions!

Dr. Zorka is the creator of various weapons of warfare, including a devisualizer belt which renders him invisible; an eight-foot tall slave robot (Ed Wolff), robot spiders that can destroy life or paralyse it and he also has a deadly meteorite fragment from which he extracts an element which can induce suspended animation in an entire army.

Foreign spies, operating under the guise of a foreign language school, are trying to buy or mostly steal the meteorite element, while his former partner, Dr. Fred Mallory (Edwin Stanley), upset that Zorka will not turn his inventions over to the U.S. Government, blows the whistle on him to Captain Bob West (Robert Kent) of the Military Intelligence Department.

Tired of answering the door and saying no to the spies and the government, Zorka moves his lab.

Later tradegy strikes when Zorka’s wife (Dora Clement) is killed, Zorka, who built for his own amusement up to this point, is crushed and swears eternal vengeance against anyone trying to use his creations to make himself world dictator.

Zorka would succeed if not for his assistant Monk (Jack C. Smith), an escaped convict virtually enslaved by Zorka, who is cowardly, treacherous and totally incompetent, and whose accidental or deliberate interference with Zorka’s efforts repeatedly frustrates his master’s own plans…