The Invisible Man (1933)
If I was to make a case for a decade that was the Golden Age of horror and monster movies, I would choose the 1930s. A case can be made for other decades, such as the 1960s which offered up Night of the Living Dead, The Innocents, The Haunting, Witchfinder General (aka The Worm Creepeth)…
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The Movie Screen Scene
If I was to make a case for a decade that was the Golden Age of horror and monster movies, I would choose the 1930s. A case can be made for other decades, such as the 1960s which offered up Night of the Living Dead, The Innocents, The Haunting, Witchfinder General (aka The Worm Creepeth) and Rosemary’s Baby.

However the 1930s saw the creation or popularisation of a number of monsters that would be reused and imitated for decades to come. This was the decade of Todd Browning’s Dracula and the best version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Werewolves (Werewolf of London), mummies (The Mummy) and zombies (White Zombie) appeared on screen. The monster movie took a major step forward when King Kong was released in 1933. These films established most of the tropes that we now associate with these monsters.

Some of these movies were made by famous directors, but they were mostly flirting with the horror genre while on their way to make movies of a different kind. However there were two directors who are mostly remembered for their horror films during this decade. One was Todd Browning, who made Dracula, Freaks, Mark of the Vampire and the Devil-Doll.

However the director who most excelled in the horror genre during this time was James Whale. Combining a taste for the macabre with a strong helping of kitsch and camp humour, Whale made four horror movie classics during this time. It is he who created all the clichés about the monster in his 1931 Frankenstein movie, and he followed this up with Bride of Frankenstein, which brought us a new iconic creation. The Old Dark House helped to set in place many of the tropes about strangers arriving at a creepy house during the night – tormented residents, creepy servants and inclement weather.

Finally there is The Invisible Man. Is The Invisible Man a horror movie or science fiction? Its plot about a scientific experiment gone wrong would suggest the latter. However the Invisible Man is often counted among the monsters created by Universal Pictures, and in the 1930s sci-fi and horror often went hand in glove. Indeed they still do.

James Whale replaced Cyril Gardner, who was originally intended to direct the film. One reason why Whale agreed to make the film was because he wished to distract the studio from pressuring him to make another Frankenstein movie. Thankfully, this ploy failed and Whale later made his masterpiece, The Bride of Frankenstein.

What followed proved to be a great success. It even gained the approval of H G Wells, who had written the original book, and had asked for his work to be treated with more respect than had happened with another of his books, The Island of Dr Moreau. This was filmed as The Island of Lost Souls, and Wells had loathed it.

The Invisible Man was reasonably faithful to the book. More importantly it was faithful to the spirit of Wells’ novel. Wells had a taste for confronting the absurdly normal with the alarmingly abnormal, and watching as ordinary people are forced to deal with an extraordinary threat. In many Wells stories, these situations are more humorous than horrific.

Whale was the ideal director to capture this side of Wells, as his films show a mischievous humour to them. The Invisible Man has many comical scenes, such as one where the Invisible Man steals a policeman’s trousers and marches down the street wearing the disembodied trousers singing, ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’.

It was not only in the plot, but in the casting that Whale felt free to indulge in his brand of camp humour. Some of the supporting cast seem to be chosen more for their grotesque value than for their acting skills – pompous-looking policemen with bizarre moustaches, and the hysterical, shrieking Una O’Connor as the landlady at the inn where The Invisible Man stays.

However Whale was also something of a talent spotter. This film contains a number of actors who would later be more famous. The heroine Flora Cranley is played by Gloria Stuart, who went on to play the older Rose in Titanic. Her father is Henry Travers, who became famous as the angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. Also watch out for John Carradine as an informer and Walter Brennan as the villager whose bicycle is stolen.

Best of all though is the main star of the movie. James Whale had made Boris Karloff a household name when he cast him as the monster in Frankenstein. The Invisible Man helped to establish Claude Rains as a prominent actor. Rains never acquired the same amount of fame as Karloff. Whereas Karloff was tall and imposing, making him the ideal monster, Rains was diminutive in stature and not good-looking enough to be a romantic lead.

For this reason, we never see Rains in the film, except when he is in bandages. When the Invisible Man briefly appears at the end, he is played by a different actor. However the role allowed Rains to capitalise on his biggest asset – his voice. Rains delivered his lines with an elegant diction that is essential to a character who is heard and not seen. His voice is fluid and well-tempered to deal with the role. He delivers his lines with a trace of anger, bordering on hysteria that gives us a clear sense of a man who has gone insane.

There are many movies about scientists who discover something that they should not, and these usually start around the beginning of the scientist’s experiments or at the point where he makes a breakthrough. The Invisible Man begins instead in the middle of the story, and has no flashbacks. By the time the narrative begins, Griffin (Claude Rains) is already invisible.

This late beginning to the story creates a sense of mystery, albeit one that is dissipated by the movie’s title. The action takes place at wintertime, and there is snow on the ground. This adds atmosphere, and a challenge to a man who needs to move without being seen. His breath and footprints may be seen, and he is obliged to wander around naked in the freezing cold. It might be said that The Invisible Man is one of the few 1930s movies to contain nudity.

When Griffin arrives at the inn, his presence fills the residents of the small village of Iping with alarm. He is swathed from head to foot in bandages, wears dark glasses and never removes his hat and thick coat. The villagers speculate about what happened to this man. Is he a criminal on the run or the victim of an accident? Neither view is quite right, though not completely wrong either.

The bandages are being used by Griffin so that he can be seen by others, and he is frantically working on a formula to restore his visibility. He soon turns his lodgings into a chemical lab, and his rudeness to Jenny Hall, the landlady (Una O’Connor) causes her to ask her husband Herbert (Forrester Harvey) to throw Griffin out. Instead it is Herbert who is thrown out, as Griffin pushes him down the stairs.

A police officer is called, and he and the villagers enter Griffin’s room to arrest the violent lodger. However this proves to be no easy task. The madman removes all his clothes laughing hysterically, and they see that there is nothing beneath them. As he removes the bandages from his head, they look like a skull, adding to the sinister effect. He assaults his would-be captors, causes chaos around the village and escapes on a bicycle.

The scenes of Griffin’s invisibility employed special effects that were groundbreaking in their day. Naturally a good many items are moved around on strings, limiting their flexibility, but there are other effects. The film is an early example of matte processing, where two images are combined on screen to appear as one. Other effects were achieved with simple ingenuity. When Griffin removes his clothes, Rains is swathed in black velvet, and the background too is black velvet so that his features merge into this and create the illusion of invisibility.

The story is about the dangers of unethical scientific discoveries, a theme that would become a cliché in sci-fi by the 1950s. Even Griffin’s statement, “I meddled in things that man must leave alone,” sounds like the conclusion of many other sci-fi stories. What Griffin did not realise is that the chemical involved in turning him invisible had been tested before, and had driven a dog insane. This unfortunate ignorance leads to Griffin too going mad. This is a variation from the book where Griffin was not mad, merely amoral.

Another difference is the presence of Flora Cranley, his long suffering fiancée who does not appear in the book. Like many horror and sci-fi heroines she has a premonition of trouble, which is partly the result of not having heard from Griffin for a month. Flora is Griffin’s weak spot. He conducted his experiments to gain fame for her sake, and this has driven him insane. In the confusion he has forgotten Flora, and his only moment of softness comes when he gets to briefly meet her again.

Griffin’s fiancée has another admirer. This is Dr Kemp (William Harrigan). A sympathetic character in the book, Kemp is treated with more hostility in this version. There is no question of Flora finding happiness with Kemp after Griffin’s death. He is a repellent figure here. He makes a pass at Flora while she is still distressed at Griffin’s absence.

Later Griffin seeks to enlist Kemp as his assistant, but there is no love or respect for his colleague. Griffin calls Kemp a “dirty little coward”, and Kemp helps him out of fear until he finds an opportunity to betray Griffin to the police. However Griffin escapes and takes vengeance on his former ally in an amusing scene that might make us feel sorry for Kemp.

Griffin thinks that his invisibility will give him the power to hold the world at ransom. Indeed his ambitions are those of the megalomaniac. H proclaims, “An invisible man can rule the world. Nobody will see him come, nobody will see him go. He can hear every secret. He can rob and kill!” He tells Kemp: “Suddenly I realised the power I held, the power to rule, to make the world grovel at my feet.” Later he boasts to Flora, and is insulting about her father: “He’s got the brain of a tapeworm, a maggot, beside mine.” Griffin shares his plans with her:

I shall offer my secret to the world, with all its terrible power! The nations of the world will bid for it – thousands, millions. The nation that wins my secret can sweep the world with invisible armies!

These are not just idle words. Griffin carries out his acts of terror. He begins in a small way with pushing over a pram, stealing a bicycle, and murdering a police officer who thinks that his invisibility is a hoax. The world sees the events at Iping as a mass delusion, but this soon changes when Griffin steps up his activities. He causes a train crash and robs a bank, merrily throwing money in the street. The alarmed authorities step up the search for him. However it is dangerous to hunt an invisible man, and Griffin mercilessly murders members of the search party who are out to find him.

These actions are familiar to us now. They are the acts of a terrorist – irrational and indiscriminate, uncaring of whom his victims are just so long as he thinks that the authorities can be made to cave in to his unreasonable demands. The behaviour is that of a terrorist, but the words are those of the totalitarian. In a year when Stalin’s oppression was causing the death of millions of Russians by famine, and Hitler was taking control in Germany, we have Griffin boasting of his enormous power to subdue his own nation: “Power to make multitudes run squealing in terror at the touch of my little invisible finger.”

To some extent the audience are invited to partly identify with Griffin. It is hard not to share some of his malicious glee as he plays practical jokes on the villagers, though his murders ultimately prevent him from becoming a hero. Some of this sneaking sympathy we feel for Griffin is the sympathy for the outsider who chooses to humorously subvert the established order. H G Wells was a socialist, and may have found Griffin partly appealing as a figure of anarchy, albeit one that targets the poor as well as the rich.

James Whale too was an outsider, a gay man in an age when homosexuality was illegal. Maybe he too enjoyed the sight of Griffin cocking a snook at the world that he was excluded from. In one amusing scene, the invisible Griffin throws an object at a prim and respectable picture of Jenny Hall on the wall of his room, knocking it lopsided. Mrs Hall is the image of a world of heterosexual married life that Whale was not part of, and I doubt he would want to be attached to this shrewish hysterical woman who bullies her husband.

Thankfully Griffin has fatally underestimated his powers. Invisibility is as much of a curse as a gift, a disability more than a superpower. Griffin cannot reverse his invisibility, and is cut off from normal human interaction. Even his invisibility cannot protect him. Food is visible when it is digested. His outline can be detected in rain or soot. The dirt under his fingernails is visible. Ultimately Griffin is betrayed by his snoring when he sleeps in a barn, and by his footprints in the snow when he tries to escape. His invisibility has strict limitations, and does not make him a god as he hoped.

The Invisible Man was the second most successful movie for Universal Studio after Frankenstein, and is still respected today. The exciting potential and indeed the limitations of invisibility proved to be an interesting subject, and like many of Universal’s monster movies it inspired a number of inferior sequels. Whatever the faults of later entries in the series, the original movie was made with style and wit.