The Invisible Man 1933 starring Claude Rains

We are going back a long way with this one, to the universal age of horror movies (1933 specifically). It’s a dark blizzard in a remote village, a figure walks through the storm, he’s covered in bandages. Entering an inn he asks for a private room with a fire. Time passes and the wife of the inn keeper gets annoyed by the visitor and demands he gets thrown out after he angrily throws her out the room. The village makes a mob demanding he be removed, and though he pleads them to stop he’s had enough, with a mad laugh he begins to remove the bandages and clothing revealing he’s invisible!

Previously invisibility had been used as a benevolent way in fantasy tales, HG Wells (you may remember the name), however, wrote a science fiction story and gave it into the hands of a madman. This allows you to see just how dangerous such a man could be but it also follows a sort of Jekyll and Hyde theme. You learn what he was like before he began to lose his mind ( a side effect of the invisibility formula). We learn most of this from his former lover, an inclusion to the film that wasn’t in the original book by Wells  (people including romantic love stories into adaptations isn’t  new)

At times when he’s removing the bandages or clothing you can see where the green screen is (or whatever the equivalent was back then) but other than that the effects hold up VERY well. It’s not the cheesy ‘run-away-from-the-thing-you-can’t-see’ joke (please look up Attack of the Completely Invisible Aliens from Red Dwarf season 8) because they have to show you somethings there even when you can’t see it, which works with his now unhinged personality:- a woman running away yelling murder as a pair of trousers skip along to his singing.

It’s not a long film, but then once again early days of talking films and people genuinely thought people couldn’t stay on their arses for that long (now remember how long the Lord of the Rings was) and I would recommend watching like I did first time, with a bunch of other universal monster movies. Why? because The Invisible Man kills more people than all the monsters combined! It helps to get the idea of the danger of an invisible man.

Think about it, he could be in that room, right next to you, and you might not even know it, not just to harm you, but could be listening in on your conversations ( distracting you by writing a review and waiting for you to read to sneak up and AHHHH!)

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The Invisible Man 1933 starring Claude Rains