Out of sight

THE INVISIBLE MAN I There’s a clear case of murder in Leigh Whannell’s daring Universal Monster reboot…

When the Dark Universe went the way of Drac in the daylight, there was a silver lining. Instead of an over-ambitious interconnected universe that was riding Marvel’s coat-tails, Universal would instead do things the old-fashioned way: by assigning their roster of iconic monsters to filmmakers with unique visions, on a case-by-case basis, and, crucially, with no expectation that the films would also be a piece of a larger puzzle.

Enter Upgrade writer/director Leigh Whannell. Though no stranger to horror, and a fan of James Whale’s 1933 adaptation, Whannell admits that making an Invisible Man movie wasn’t on his bucket list. “It was something that was pitched to me. I was not out there hankering to make an Invisible Man movie,” Whannell tells Teasers. After being called into – he thought – a backslapping meeting about Upgrade’s success, Whannell instead found himself being quizzed on H.G. Wells’ iconic creation. “One of the guys in the meeting just off-hand said, ‘These movies are hard to write. If The Invisible Man is the good guy, what scares The Invisible Man? Who’s the bad guy?’ And I said, ‘Well, he’s not the good guy. He’s the bad guy, obviously.’ And they all said, ‘Ooh, that’s interesting.’”