85 Years Ago, The Invisible Woman Genderswapped A Horror Classic For Laughs

Horror cinema has long been defined by its most famous characters. The output of the Universal monster era, wherein the legendary studio pioneered a new age of big-screen horror, became some of the most recognizable and copied creations in movie history. Dracula, Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, and the Invisible Man were reinterpreted and ripped off countless times, often by Universal itself. And with the Invisible Man, the studio chose to keep the franchise running with an ahead-of-its-time gender twist.

Directed by James Whale two years after he made Frankenstein, The Invisible Man is, like much of Universal’s output, an adaptation of a novel, this one by sci-fi legend H.G. Wells. It centers on an eccentric scientist (Claude Rains), whose bandage-concealed face arouses the suspicion of his small town home. It’s soon revealed that his experiments have rendered him invisible, and he has no idea how to make himself visible once more. The hook for audiences was the special effects, which made Rains disappear from view, an expensive and ground-breaking process that paid off and made the film a huge hit.

As remains the case for any horror movie, once you have a hit, the studio wants sequels. Seven years later, Universal released The Invisible Man Returns, starring a young Vincent Price. Later, they’d change up the genre to a wartime adventure in Invisible Agent, then have the character hang out with comedians Abbott and Costello. Before that, however, they did a gender swap with The Invisible Woman. Hey, it worked for The Bride of Frankenstein.

Released 85 years ago today, The Invisible Woman stars Virginia Bruce as Kitty, a department store model who’s fired from her job and goes to work, as one does, for an eccentric scientist who needs a guinea pig for his new invisibility device. Hijinks ensue, and Kitty decides to get revenge on her former boss, but things go awry when gangsters get involved and decide to steal the invisibility machine for their own schemes.

Humor has always been part of the Invisible Man franchise; the first film spends a surprising amount of its short screen time having Claude Rains giggle like a schoolgirl as he pulls off childish pranks in the buff. The Invisible Woman ignores horror altogether and flings itself headfirst into screwball comedy. Most of the jokes are standard invisible shenanigans, but many are also about the saucy prospects of a naked woman no one can see. It’s not especially raunchy, since this is a film made during the Hays Code, but it’s not shy about its intentions either. When Claude Rains stripped in The Invisible Man, it was strictly comedic. Here, there’s an element of titillation, even if you literally see nothing.

Most of the jokes are pretty hackneyed, and the effects aren’t as strong as those of its predecessors, but as a slice of harmless B-movie entertainment, The Invisible Woman does what it sets out to achieve. It’s silly and low-stakes, and ends with a cute happily ever after, complete with an invisible baby. The legendary John Barrymore has a ball hamming it up as a mad scientist, and there’s a cameo from the Wicked Witch of the West herself, Margaret Hamilton.

Still, it feels like a missed opportunity for the film not to make its heroine as scheming as her male predecessors. Claude Rains is goofy, but his movie is steeped in cynicism, giving it a caustic edge that drives home the horror of its conceit. Here, Kitty has some fun, then settles down to be a wife and mother. It’s all so fascinatingly innocent. Would it be so unusual to have her follow in the footsteps of Dracula’s daughter or the She-Wolf of London and be a baddie?

Later remakes and re-imaginings of the Invisible Man narrative would focus more on the sinister implications behind its science. Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man and Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man were bleak tales of toxic masculinity that used the sci-fi set-up to explore the tyranny of patriarchy. Invisibility may have made their men mad, but it also gave them permission to abuse and destroy. What does the female version of that look like? Would it focus on how sexism often leaves women feeling ignored? Is there a version of this story where an invisible woman is a terrorizing figure? It’s not impossible to imagine, but it is starkly different.

In 2019, Universal announced plans to remake The Invisible Woman, with Elizabeth Banks directing and Erin Cressida Wilson writing the script. Little was known about the project before it was shelved, but it was said to be “wildly different” from Wannell’s movie. Perhaps that means it wasn’t horror at all, but whatever the case, it’s intriguing that such a speculative concept as invisibility reveals a gendered divide.