Costume Party
I wear a small self-sticking sign
upon my costume,
which is my normal self,
in blue ink on white,
“I AM”
and on the white
in white I write:
“INVISIBLE”
The Invisible Man! -- Chad Lewis
I wear a small self-sticking sign
upon my costume,
which is my normal self,
in blue ink on white,
“I AM”
and on the white
in white I write:
“INVISIBLE”
The Invisible Man! -- Chad Lewis
H. G. Wells serialized his novella “The Invisible Man” in Pearson's Weekly in 1897 before publishing it as a novel the same year. It is about a man named Griffin who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light and thus becomes invisible. He was given a first name, “Jack,” in the 1933 film adaptation by R.C. Sherriff, Philip Wylie, and Preston Sturges, directed by James Whale, starring Claude Rains in his first American screen appearance, who portrayed him mostly as a disembodied voice or covered in bandages; he was only shown clearly at the end of the movie. The film is particularly known for its groundbreaking visual effects by John P. Fulton, John J. Mescall, and Frank D. Williams: when Griffin had some of his clothes on or was taking them off, Rains was shot in a completely black velvet suit against a black velvet background and then the scene was combined with another via a matte process, while his disappearance was created by making a head and body cast of the actor, from which a mask was made, which was then photographed against a specially prepared background. Wells criticized the film for changing his brilliant scientist into a crazy person, but Whale defended the alteration because "in the minds of rational people only a lunatic would want to make himself invisible anyway.”
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