The notion of a modernized horror reboot now doesn’t always inspire confidence. Rarely does taking a classic horror tale and updating it for contemporary times result in a movie that’s more than the sum of its parts. In recent years, the category has produced disappointments like the half-baked horror-com Lisa Frankenstein, the widely panned 2017 Mummy remake, and the groaningly unfunny Dracula spinoff Renfield, uninspired offshoots of long-canonized monster movies.
Five years ago, in 2020, in the weeks before the world changed forever, Australian writer-director Leigh Whannell defied the odds with The Invisible Man. Based, in the loosest sense of the word, on the 1933 Universal Pictures classic of the same name (which in turn drew from the H. G. Wells novel), the film manages to pay homage to its source material while also delivering a profoundly frightening horror flick that stands as its own unique entity.
