THE INVISIBLE MAN
Having just finished DRACULA, I was engaged to write a two-hour television adaptation of Universal's classic, THE INVISIBLE MAN.
What always intrigued me about the property was the actual physical debilitation and psychological impact of invisibility. Our reliance on visual cues are critical to coordination. Being unable to see one's own hands and feet would make even simple activities such as walking and picking up objects a challenge. Just the absence of the "frame" of one's eyelids and nose would be jarring.
And how difficult it would be to safely navigate a world in which one couldn't be seen by others? A city block would become a potentially lethal obstacle-course.
More importantly, the project gave me the opportunity to to explore the dissociative effect invisibility would engender in the protagonist and how it would short-circuit his sense of cause-and-effect. How would he process the disconnect between his environment and the impact he has upon it?
Might he begin to doubt his own very existence?
The protagonist, Richard Griffin, is a passive introvert who has been "invisible" his entire life--to his family, his classmates, his coworkers, even, eventually, to his spouse. Ironically, it is only upon achieving transparence that he becomes all-too-visible to nefarious government operatives.
The result is this perverse and darkly comic take on a horror classic.