Bwana Devil is a 1952 American adventure B movie written, directed, and produced by Arch Oboler, and starring Robert Stack, Barbara Britton, and Nigel Bruce.

[3][4][5] Bwana Devil is based on the true story of the Tsavo maneaters and filmed with the Natural Vision 3D system.

Thousands of workers are building the Uganda Railway, Africa's first railroad, and intense heat and sickness make it a formidable task.

The plot was based on a well-known historical event, that of the Tsavo maneaters, in which many workers building the Uganda Railway were killed by lions.

These incidents were also the basis for the book The Man-eaters of Tsavo (1907), the story of the events as written by Lt. Col. J. H. Patterson, the British engineer who killed the animals.

Former screenwriter Milton Gunzburg and his brother Julian thought they had a solution with their Natural Vision 3D film process.

[11] The Paramount Ranch, now located in The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, sat in for an African savanna.

[16] At all U.S. screenings of feature-length 3D films in the 1950s, the polarized light method was used and the audience wore 3D glasses with gray Polaroid filters.

The two-strip Natural Vision projection system required making substantial alterations to a theater's projectors and providing its screen with a special non-depolarizing surface.

Long thought lost, the short rejoined Bwana Devil for screenings at the Egyptian Theater in 2003 and 2006.

[20] A lawsuit followed, in which producer Edward L. Alperson Jr. claimed that he was part owner of the film after purchasing a share of it for $1,000,000 USD.

"[22] Life magazine photographer J. R. Eyerman took a series of photos of the audience wearing 3D glasses at the premiere.

[26] Another of the photos was used as a symbol of alienation under capitalism, for the American cover of Guy Debord's book The Society of the Spectacle (1973).

The photo used for Debord's book shows the audience in "a virtually trance-like state of absorption, their faces grim, their lips pursed".

However, in the one chosen by Life, "the spectators are laughing, their expressions of hilarity conveying the pleasure of an uproarious, active spectatorship.