It's often said that difficult situations lead to innovation, but there’s also a Spanish expression – something like ‘laziness brings about all sorts of problems,’ similar to the English saying “idle hands are the devil’s playground.” I think the connection between creating something new and being lazy is largely due to technology; that's why a film as old as The Invisible Man, made almost a century ago, can look better than many modern movies with computer-generated imagery. It just works, even when it doesn’t seem like it should. Jorge Luis Borges once discussed the elaborate measures H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man takes to conceal himself – things like wigs, dark glasses, and fake facial hair – so that people can't see someone who is already unseen. Director James Whale put in a similar amount of effort to ensure we understand there’s somebody present even though we can’t directly observe them. The cleverness involved in making the Invisible Man feel real reminds me of the idea that you can judge something by its results; Dr. Jack Griffin, played by Claude Rains, certainly gives a new meaning to the phrase “conspicuous by his absence.” The film's overall success is even more remarkable when you consider it was accomplished with wires that needed to be carefully hidden because digital editing didn’t exist back then. Some of the other special effects, specifically those showing the Invisible Man on his own rather than interacting with others, aren’t quite as believable, but they don’t feel any less convincing than today's green screens and motion capture techniques. A key element in making the film work is Rains’s acting. He has limited opportunities to show emotion – we only see his face until the very end, and even then it's after he's died – but he compensates for that in several ways: through his posture and movements, which includes a memorable scene of Griffin’s pants moving on their own down a country road, and later with his voice, which he manipulates to fully express the character’s descent into insanity.

Source on TMDB