5 Years Ago, One Incredible Horror Reboot Set a New Standard
This Invisible Man defied horrible expectations.
The notion of a modernized horror reboot now doesn’t always inspire confidence. Rarely does taking a classic horror tale and updating it for contemporary times result in a movie that’s more than the sum of its parts. In recent years, the category has produced disappointments like the half-baked horror-com Lisa Frankenstein, the widely panned 2017 Mummy remake, and the groaningly unfunny Dracula spinoff Renfield, uninspired offshoots of long-canonized monster movies.
Five years ago, in 2020, in the weeks before the world changed forever, Australian writer-director Leigh Whannell defied the odds with The Invisible Man. Based, in the loosest sense of the word, on the 1933 Universal Pictures classic of the same name (which in turn drew from the H. G. Wells novel), the film manages to pay homage to its source material while also delivering a profoundly frightening horror flick that stands as its own unique entity.
Whannell showed how a modern reboot of familiar horror IP is done: take what works about the original, but don't just modernize the settings and effects; modernize the whole perspective and reveal the terrors from a different angle. The original pre-code Invisible Man centered around the eponymous stranger, a chemist named Jack Griffin, who turns himself invisible and then, unhinged and unmoored from legal consequences, loses his humanity and embarks upon a reign of murder and brutality.
The remake, which hit theaters five years ago this week, grossing $144 million just before the 2020 lockdowns shuttered cinemas, reimagines the character as a modern billionaire: a sociopathic optics engineer named Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). More significantly, it flips the perspective of Griffin’s victim: his girlfriend, Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss). As the movie opens, Cecilia flees Adrian’s secluded mansion in the middle of the night to escape the abusive relationship. Struggling with PTSD and fearful of Adrian tracking her down, she hides out at the home of her old friend James, an extremely jacked cop.
Cecilia is relieved when she learns that Adrian has been found dead of an apparent suicide. Then an invisible figure begins terrorizing her and harming her loved ones, and she gradually realizes Adrian has faked his demise and is exploiting his scientific genius to exact cruel vengeance. Accentuated by a score that sounds like a synthesizer possessed by demons, the psychological terror starts mild — an invisible figure entering her room at night, pulling the blanket from her bed — and escalates into gruesome action, including a truly harrowing scene involving a restaurant knife wielded by unseen hands.
There are modern horrors, and then there are primal horrors. As a new spin on a century-old idea, The Invisible Man works because it exploits both. The story encompasses modern fears like tech-powered surveillance, malevolent billionaires, and gaslighting, but it also taps into some deep-rooted, primal fears — being hunted by a person you cannot see, being framed for horrific crimes you did not commit, being unable to get your loved ones to believe you are not crazy.
Elisabeth Moss at the debut on The Invisible Man on February 24, 2020.
Moss isn’t typically thought of as a scream queen, but she does extraordinary work here embodying a woman haunted and driven to the edges of her sanity by a homicidal force she cannot see. The action scenes require a bracing physicality (Moss reportedly did some of her own stunts for a scene in which she’s tossed around the kitchen by an invisible assailant), yet the emotional terrain is even more brutal. Moss goes for broke in sequences like the one where she’s restrained to a bed in a psych ward, screaming in terror at a villain she can’t see but knows is watching.
It’s hard to make an invisible man come alive onscreen, but Whannell gets creative, swapping out the ghoulish facial bandages of the original for an invisible bodysuit that starts malfunctioning after Cecilia stabs it with a pen, allowing viewers fleeting glimpses of the villain during the third act. The filmmaker also finds clever ways to let us catch momentary sight of him in earlier scenes, such as when Cecilia dumps white paint on her attacker, eerily illuminating his outline.
The film functions on a thematic level as an allegory for domestic abuse and manipulative relationships. The female perspective heightens the psychological horror, and the abuse metaphors aren’t subtle; in one early scene, Cecilia recounts how, during their relationship, Adrian exerted control over what she ate and what she said. As Moss herself says in a DVD featurette: “I think there are a lot of people who have dealt with invisible men in their own lives.”
But you can ignore those overarching themes, and the film still works on a baser level as a well-crafted diabolical thrill ride that’s scary as hell. I’d argue that it’s among the best horror movies of the decade so far, and a sneakily influential one, helping to popularize the trauma-as-horror trend that’s cropped up in subsequent macabre hits like the Smile franchise and Talk to Me.
With The Invisible Man, Whannell demonstrated that this most elusive of Universal monsters is both timeless and timely. We’ve all fantasized about what we would do if we could obtain the power of invisibility. But here’s a movie that reverses the fantasy and asks, what if the worst person you know wielded that power against you?
