One of the best and most darkly funny horror highs of the 1930s. While we can’t see Claude Rains as the Invisible Man, he makes up for that with his maniacal voice performance full of evil cackling and devilish tones. He’s a scientist who figures out how to make himself invisible, but a side effect of his formula is that it also turns him into a psychopath. He wreaks havoc in a small English country village where he commits a few murders and freaks people out by walking around covered in unnerving bandages when he’s not flinging glass bottles around and tipping over baby carriages. The police are forced to get creative to stop him.
The story gets chugging right from the start—like most of the old Universal horrors of the 30s, this has a great opening scene—and is perfectly suited to the eccentric eye of director James Whale. It’s a precursor to the outrageous black comedy of Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein a few years later.
Based on the H.G. Wells novel.