Column The SF Path to Higher Consciousness The Invisible Man and the Unseen Hand of Power Tracing the onscreen evolution of the Invisible Man and what it tells us about power and fear. By Dan Persons | Published on October 9, 2025 Credit: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Universal Pictures I’m not sure I quite get the whole thing with dictators and their parades. For one thing, I don’t think a parade really counts unless it’s got a giant, helium-filled Spider-Man balloon and Nathan Lane singing Luck Be a Lady Tonight from atop a 20-foot-high float shaped like the Manhattan skyline. All this military stuff, the tanks and missile carriers and 20,000 precision-marching soldiers (as well as China’s newest addition: Robot wolves! Arooooo!), that crap don’t cut it for me. Maybe it’s different if you’re in the crowd and are overwhelmed with the size of it all and the shared sense of national pride. And it must be a rush for the dictator, seeing your amassed military might rallied at the snap of your fingers. Me, watching on the TV, I keep thinking, Where do they park all those tanks? And, Are those nuclear missiles you’re trucking around armed? Is that wise when you’ve just cut the budget for pothole repairs? And, I’ll bet at least 40% of those soldiers are thinking, “I gotta pee real bad.” It’s too ostentatious, is what it is. It screams of overcompensation. It’s not power; it’s a show of power—an antiquated media circus ripped from the playbook of the twentieth century, a rehash of the stuff Leni Riefenstahl could crank out in her sleep. I watch with the sense that the future of warfare rests in the hands of nerds in control rooms piloting drones, and instead of feeling impressed, overwhelmed, or fearful, I’m more likely to be snickering to myself. I get why someone might think that showing off this way conveys strength—“seeing is believing” remains a good general rule. But actual power is not wielded solely through the stuff that can be seen. There has to be something behind the spectacle—an idea, an impression—that feels true and lives on whether or not you’re presently looking at phalanxes of heavy armaments. James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1933) makes for an interesting contrast with the original H.G. Wells novel, published in 1897. It starts out strikingly close to the book: A mysterious, bandage-wrapped stranger arrives at a small inn in a small, English town. His imperious manner and fanatical desire for privacy only serve to stir up concerns among the locals, and after the police are summoned following his attack on the innkeepers, he reveals himself to be, in his own words, the Invisible Man, aka Jack Griffin (Claude Rains, in his first star turn… though you don’t actually get to see his face until the very end). While the rest of the movie continues to touch on points of Wells’ novel, it does make some notable digressions. A love interest is introduced in the person of Flora (Gloria Stuart), who’s initially seen standing behind a spray of flowers. (Get it?) And while, in the book, Griffin’s promised “reign of terror” doesn’t get much further than a handful of deaths, he’s much more successful in the film, graduating from individual murders to a disastrous train derailment. Most significantly, while the book keeps its viewpoint rooted among the people who interact with Griffin, as the film moves into its final act, it becomes something of a police procedural, with the combined branches of law enforcement struggling to draw a dragnet around the unseen madman on the loose. One clever little bit in the latter half stuck with me: Before the chief of police (Dudley Digges) holds a strategy meeting, he has his officers hoist up large net, and walk it across the empty room, the better to snag Griffin if he’s dared to attend. Good idea, I thought, and then thought again: There’s a chair against the wall—he could be standing on it and those dopes’d never know. Both Wells and Whale touch on it: As Griffin descends into madness and megalomania, he revels in the notion the he could engage in any activity, commit any crime, and get away scot-free. This is his reign of terror: not a coordinated effort or an unleashing of the masses to perpetrate atrocities, but one single man, who could be anywhere, at any time. No one is safe, not on the streets, not at home, not in the most fortified shelter. The thing is, that only translates to power if everyone is alerted to the game—if it so insinuates itself into the populace that no one can have a moment of peace. That’s where Whale, deploying the 20th-century miracle of radio, gives his Invisible Man an advantage over his 19th-century counterpart. In Whale’s rendition, one doesn’t have to wait for the daily paper or the village grapevine to spread the word. In one second, Griffin manages to invade the living rooms, and the consciousnesses, of a nation. We’ve since invented a phrase for that: “living rent-free” in people’s heads. But Wells defined the concept and Whale capitalized on it. At a time when the world was reeling in the aftermath of economic catastrophe and still shaking off the effects of what was then called the Great War (little did anyone suspect what lay ahead, save a cautious few… and H.G. Wells), the idea that one man could rule over the entire planet may not have seemed all that implausible. As tech grew more sophisticated, as radio and television and satellites and the internet simultaneously made the world smaller and more interconnected, yet revealed how vast and variegated humanity could be, the notion that a single person with the power of invisibility could dominate a planet, or even a nation, seemed far less credible. Which, come the 21st century, posed a bit of a problem for Universal. The Invisible Man was part of their stable of famous monsters, the lot of which they’d been trying for years to leverage into their own, horrific cinematic universe. (Kevin Feige, what have ye wrought?) A blood-hungry vampire, a tragic lycanthrope, or a revivified mummy could be rebooted without much change to their essential natures (not that those attempts were successful, mind). But an invisible megalomaniac out to rule the world all on his ownsome stretched suspension of disbelief just a shade too far. In a wise move, Universal reached out to their low-budget partner, Blumhouse, to take a stab at a reimagining of the story. They in turn tapped Leigh Whannell to write and direct. His solution (incorporating a nod or two to Paul Verhoeven’s 2000 thriller Hollow Man): Keep the mad scientist’s lust for power, but turn it from world-conquering ambition to something more intimate, and profoundly more disturbing. Jack Griffin may have wanted to rule over millions; in The Invisible Man (2020), Adrian Griffin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) just wants control over one unfortunate soul. Our introduction to Cecilia Kass (Elisabeth Moss) is in the dead of night, as she is fleeing Griffin’s well-appointed and starkly sterile home. She’s been a virtual prisoner of the pathologically controlling scientist, isolated from her friends and family, constantly under surveillance, and incapable of acting without his express permission. The mere act of escape—aided by her sister Emily (Harriet Dyer), a friend James (Aldis Hodge), and James’ daughter Sydney (Storm Reid)—is traumatic enough. When Adrian—a genius in optics who has invented a suit studded with tiny whizzing lenses that makes its wearer invisible—resolves to drag her back, he embarks upon a campaign of intimidation meant to assure that her wounds never heal. [It’s probably a good idea at this point to slip in a spoiler warning—so there ya go.] Griffin’s strategy is to deploy the philosophy of “If I can’t have you, no one will,” filtered through a campaign of vicious gaslighting. He drives wedges between Cecilia and those who would support her, committing acts of sabotage and assault—all the way to murder—while directing the blame back upon the woman he’s victimizing. When she insists that the crimes have been committed by the unseen hands of Adrian, her protests are regarded as the ravings of a person whose PTSD has driven her to the heights of paranoia. Abandoned and isolated (and subject to one further, devastating trick by Adrian to convince Cecilia’s supporters that he’s innocent of any crime), Cecilia eventually has no recourse but to flee back into Adrian’s slimily forgiving arms. (She’s got a surprise for him, though. I won’t go into that, here.) It’s the narrowed-down intimacy that gives this modern-day interpretation its bite. Wells and Whale—those old-fashioned kids—imagined that a megalomaniac would want to accrue influence through overt acts that demonstrated his power. Whannell posits something more deeply sinister: That power is seized and wielded by convincing your target of its own powerlessness. The Griffin of 1933 commits his crimes with such flamboyant zeal that they frequently, and deliberately, drift into comedy. Whannel’s take on the calculating and cold-blooded Invisible Man allows for no mirth—the suffering he inflicts on Cecilia is palpable, and almost unbearable to watch. We get no explanation as to why he must have this woman under his control, it defies logic (there are a few things in the film’s final act that defy logic, but that’s another issue). All that we know is that for Adrian, the quest for power is a zero-sum game—he will mercilessly flood his victim’s zone with atrocity and manipulation, the better to rob his perceived property of any sense of agency. There is, quite frankly, something reassuringly wholesome in the straightforward megalomania of 1933’s Invisible Man. Whannell’s Adrian Griffin, though, is truly repugnant, a man who will gladly make you suffer to satisfy his own compulsive need for control. Cecilia’s solution in the film is not suitable for real life, but here in our world, there is a way—difficult, not perfect, but not impossible—to thwart a bastard who seeks to rob anyone of their will to resist: Stand up to them, let them know that they are seen, and that they will not be permitted to play their games. Throw a spotlight on the bully who thinks they cannot be restrained, call them out again and again, for as long as it takes, and let them see how their power dissipates in the glare of exposure. Over the years, James Whale’s The Invisible Man has taken on the well-deserved patina of a charming horror classic. Leigh Whannel’s version, in contrast, is all teeth, and more disturbing for its unsparing portrayal of an abusive relationship taken to extremes. But while Whannell succeeded in redirecting Wells’ concept into something uncomfortably personal, the film still has something to say in a broader sense, about people who seek power for power’s sake, and the challenges we face in countering them. But what do you think? Which version do you favor? Did the contemporary version touch a nerve? The comments section is below for your input. As always, please keep your thoughts friendly and constructive—no one is invisible, and everyone deserves their say…[end-mark] The post <i>The Invisible Man</i> and the Unseen Hand of Power appeared first on Reactor.