Claude Rains made a big impression, despite not being seen for most of the film:

‘…that vibrant, insistent voice, which implants every word of a long part more clearly in our brain than if we could see the speaker.  Yes, Hollywood had cause to be grateful for Claude Rains...’

LH sums up:

‘The Invisible Man is a film of many wonders and innumerable delights.’

LH places this horror classic in context:

‘Though it belonged to the middle generation of the family tree of monsters spawned by Universal Studios in the thirties, and though it’s sequels explored every angle from outright horror to spy burlesque, The Invisible Man presents itself unequivocally as a black comedy.’

Universal would probably have preferred a Frankenstein sequel, on the whole, but the director was stalling:

‘James Whale was in search of more elegant grotesqueries which would appeal to his macabre sense of humour, and the way in which the H. G. Wells novel was adapted for the screen must have made him smile a good deal.’

Director Whale put his inimitable stamp on the film:

‘…at a spare seventy minutes The Invisible Man, edited with tremendous pace, is for the most part not only packed with fun, thrills and bewildering photographic tricks; it is a work of true eccentricity, and Hollywood did not allow many of those through its net… a great deal of the fun lies in Whale’s observation of the characters’ faces, even in the tiniest parts.’