Some of us are fated, it seems, always to be outsiders. I have no inside knowledge of the film industry. I barely keep up with the movies I want to see. Although I write books about horror films, the main players in the field don’t know those books. It’s like being invisible. I had hoped to see The Invisible Man some four years ago. The reboot, I mean. And having finally caught up, I was impressed. This is a scary movie that hits all the right buttons. Most of us, by cultural assimilation, know the bare bones of the story. A guy has figured out invisibility. What does he do with this? Uses it to assert his will over everyone. In the original, the monocaine made Dr. Jack Griffin insane. In the remake, an already controlling, self-centered millionaire (Adrian), unknown to anyone but his brother, perfects an invisibility suit. When his girlfriend (Cecilia) leaves him, he uses it to try to destroy her.
Everyone believes she’s insane. More than that, criminally insane. Cecilia knows he was an optics genius and he leaves her subtle clues that he knows where she’s hiding. He hurts those close to her and they assume Cecilia is causing the harm. Then it escalates to murder. Placed in an institution for the criminally insane, she knows Adrian is there with her. Nobody will believe her, however, since, well, he’s invisible. This is a movie nearly as harrowing as The Dark Knight. An unstable genius with unlimited resources and the ultimate alibi forces his abused ex to suffer for ever having loved him. It’s pretty incredible. (Has to be seen, I’m tempted to say, to be believed.)
Now, I’m no insider so I didn’t realize that Universal had been attempting to build a Dark Universe franchise based on the original Universal monsters. I had completely missed that Dracula Untold was the first of the reboots. I did watch it but fell asleep. (Hey, I was watching with friends who started it too late for my outsider schedule.) I never got around to seeing it with my eyes fully open. Although it made money, it wasn’t, I hear, very good. Then three years later, The Mummy bombed. I confess that there’s so many Mummy movies that I’ve lost track of them and I didn’t know this one existed. Or flopped. Invisible Man was intended as the third and the movies were to be interlaced into a Dark Universe. Plans for that franchise have been dropped, but individual movies will continue to be made. I guess I need to go back to the beginning again. It only took me a decade to learn this, as is the way with outsiders.
