What You Can’t See, Can Kill You: ‘The Invisible Man’ & Other Unseen Movie Menaces

Over the years of writing, I have fallen into the role of the resident horror hound. This mainly came about through my coverage of the brilliant FrightFest, but truth be told, I’ve always veered towards the more macabre movies. I’ve watched thousands of scary movies and have developed somewhat of a thickened skin towards them. There is one thing however, that has always creeped me out – the invisible monsters.

Why the unseen killer? Well, for the very reason that they’re unseen of course. You have no chance of seeing them coming, and before you know it, you’re dead. There’s just something so unsettling about that; how are you meant to protect yourself against something that you can’t see? At least with Freddy Krueger, you know he’ll be waiting for you in your dream. Similarly, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers keep their killing sprees to specific calendar dates, and in order to face-down Pinhead and his minions, you need to crack the Lament Configuration first. Those that have the ability to be invisible though, stick to no such rules, and it’s their unpredictability as much as their translucent nature that gets the skin crawling.

With Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man arriving in UK cinemas this week, I thought it was time to exorcise some of my demons. Here’s a list of some of the films that have terrified me over the years:

Predator 2

That’s right Predator 2, not Predator, and definitely not any others that have come since then. Now I know that Predator 2 isn’t held in the highest regard in terms of quality, but when I watched it potentially far too young (I was still in primary school), it instantly traumatised me. I had seen the Arnie version previously, and whilst on edge at times, the remote jungle setting stripped away some of the fear for me. The city-set sequel though, hit a lot closer to home. I still remember going up to my bedroom after watching it, looking into my mirror and thinking that it could be in the room right now and I wouldn’t know until it got me.

Set in the then future, now past, of 1997, the film followed Lieutenant Mike Harrigan as he investigated a rash of ritualistic murders in Los Angeles’ underbelly. The culprit was a Predator, a highly evolved and skilful alien being whom enjoys hunting humans for sport. Blessed with a plethora of tech to make it the ultimate killer: heat vision, the ability to imitate sounds and a shoulder fitted laser cannon, it was its invisibility cloak that upped its danger factor. Harrigan gives trying to defeat it a good shot, but in the end it’s some elder Predators that actually end the reign of terror. It seems that our titular predator has gone rogue and is hunting humans out of season or such.

Hollow Man

Directed by Paul Verhoeven, Hollow Man offered a modernised take on the original The Invisible Man, but took a very dark and depraved direction. Things start innocently enough with a team of scientists hard at work creating an invisibility serum. The good news is that their serum works, the bad is they can’t figure out a way to reverse it. This means that volunteer test subject, the egotistical Sebastian Crane (played by Kevin Bacon), is stuck. Initially Crane uses his new found situation to play harmless pranks on his teammates, but this soon escalates into fits of rage, sexual violence, and eventually murder.

Verhoeven delved into the human psyche and explored just how far someone would, and could, push the limits of criminality and morality if no one could see you. The chilling thing about Hollow Man is that it wasn’t a trophy-hunting alien that was the villain, but an intelligent man. Even more frightening though, is the way in which Crane acts – especially his treatment of females, which is tangibly how a small percentage of people would behave. Bacon is absolutely terrifying as Crane, nailing the smarmy sexual predator to a tee. He was so good in fact that this performance, coupled with Sleepers, made me genuinely wary of Kevin Bacon for several years.

The Unseen

Now the first two entries on my list have focused on fairly fundamental fears, but The Unseen broke me in a rather different way. Bob has a condition which means he is fading away, literally. As he ages slowly, piece-by-piece, layer-by-layer, he starts to disappear. Having given into the disorder, he abandons his family and tries to keep himself to himself. This becomes impossible when years later, his now teenage daughter tracks him down. Bob’s ailment isn’t like the olden days of invisible people, one minute they’re there, the next, poof they’ve gone. Bob is slowly and painfully vanishing piece-by-piece, in no particular order. For the most part, in order to disguise his illness from those around him, he’s heavily clad in clothing. But he doesn’t always stay hidden and the audience is able to see what it looks like to start losing chunks of flesh, rather than everything in one go. It’s a film that explores mortality on a different level; what if one day you simply disappeared, the rest of the world suddenly incapable of seeing you? Would that be worse than dying? This is a film that oozes loneliness; this one wrecked me on an emotional level.

It Follows

Although not directly invisible, the entity in It Follows feels like it is. The curse or paranormal STD – however you want to think of it, has the ability to appear as anyone at any time. It’s sole focus is to eliminate the next person on it’s list, and it’ll do anything and everything in its power to do so. Given that it can take on many forms and can hide in plain sight, makes it for all intents and purposes, as invisible as any of the others on the list. The omnipresence of the being is almost suffocating and I still vividly recall looking over my shoulder several times on my way home from the press screening, with an uncanny feeling that someone – or something – was following me. Nothing was of course, but given that I was way older than when I saw Predator 2, it was a shock to find that a film could still scare me like that on that base level.

The Invisible Man

Moving straight onto the list, and proving that I’m still clearly not over this fear, is The Invisible Man. Don’t let the name fool you, this isn’t a remake of the 1933 classic, it’s very much a film of our times. With heavy themes of domestic abuse, the film sees Elisabeth Moss’ Cecilia inherit her controlling ex’s fortune after his apparent death. Things aren’t that clear-cut though as Cecilia believes he has achieved the ability to become invisible. Worse still, he is now using his new power to assert even more control over her than ever before. With The Invisible Man, director Leigh Whannell taps directly into two of the films already on this list – Predator 2 and Hollow Man – and in doing so has essentially created my worst nightmare. Most of the drama unfolds in a fairly standard looking house and our antagonist is driven by the same dark drive as Sebastian Crane. After this film though, I imagine I won’t be alone in my fear of the unseen as Whannell wrings every last ounce of tension possible out of the two-hour run-time.

The Invisible Man is in cinemas on 28th February 2020.