The Invisible Man (1933)
by Robbo
Posted on 11 November 2021
Rating -
The Invisible Man is a 1933 American science fiction horror film directed by James Whale. A Universal Pictures production, it is based on H. G. Wells’ 1897 novel of the same name.
The film opens on a snowy night, a stranger, his face swathed in bandages and his eyes obscured by dark goggles, takes a room at The Lion’s Head Inn in the English village of Iping in Sussex where he demands to be left alone.
Later, the innkeeper, Mr. Hall, is sent by his wife to evict the stranger after he has made a huge mess in his room while doing research and has fallen behind on his rent. Angered, the stranger throws Mr. Hall down the stairs.
Confronted by a policeman and some local civilians, he removes his bandages and goggles, revealing he is invisible. Laughing maniacally, he takes off his clothes, making himself completely undetectable, and drives off his tormentors before fleeing into the countryside.
The stranger is Dr. Jack Griffin (Rains), a chemist who discovered the secret of invisibility while conducting a series of tests involving an obscure drug called Monocane.
On the evening of his escape from the inn, Griffin turns up at his colleague, Dr Kemp’s home and forces Kemp to become his visible partner in a plot to dominate the world through a reign of terror, beginning with “a few murders here and there”.
They drive back to the inn to retrieve his notebooks on the invisibility process, sneaking inside, Griffin finds a police inquiry underway, conducted by an official who believes it is all a hoax.
After securing his books, Griffin angrily attacks and kills the officer then goes on a killing spree.
He causes the derailment of a train, resulting in a hundred deaths, and throws two volunteer searchers off a cliff.
A snowstorm forces Griffin to seek shelter in a barn where he falls asleep. A farmer enters and spots movement in the hay where Griffin is sleeping and notifies the police who rush out to the farm and surround the barn. They set fire to the building, which forces Griffin to come out, leaving visible footprints in the snow.
The chief detective opens fire, mortally wounding Griffin so he is taken to hospital where, hours later he is dying and asking to see his fiancée Flora.
On his deathbed, Griffin admits to Flora, “I meddled in things that man must leave alone.”
The Invisible Man was in production as early as 1931 when it was suggested that H.G. Wells’ novel would make a good follow up to Universal’s hit film, Dracula. The studio instead chose to make Frankenstein.
The Invisible Man was intended to star Boris Karloff before he left the project and the relatively unknown Claude Rains was cast. Bela Lugosi was also considered for the part.
The Invisible Man is not the usual Universal monster film as the monster is a man, driven mad by a formula he has invented to make him invisible. Granted the power of invisibility, Griffin can do anything with impunity, including murder.
This also speaks to the duality of man, there is good an evil in all of us but most of us suppress the evil by the way we act and the decisions we make.
The Invisible Man is still quite horrifying, the idea of being confronted by a disembodied voice is terrifying, tapping into that primeval fear of the unknown. The idea that you are helpless against an unseen enemy.
The Invisible Man is one of the ‘forgotten’ Universal horror films, overshadowed by the more familiar characters such as Frankenstein and the Wolf Man, but I really do love this film and would urge everyone to see it.
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