The Most Perverted Acts Invisible People Have Committed in Movies

The age-old question of “what superpower would you choose” is a classic time-waster in the best possible way. Whether it’s completely open-ended or more specific, like choosing which of the X-Men you’d rather be, it’s an enjoyable subject for small talk and often leads to some deeply entertaining arguments about the limitations of eye lasers, etc. Among all the superpowers cooked up by the human imagination, though, there are two that seem to have a solid chokehold on the top of the hypothetical power hierarchy: the power of flight, and the power of invisibility.

Though it may seem simple, this specific face-off holds a lot more of a psychological underpinning than others. So much so that it’s even been covered in Psychology Today, and the subject of a widespread survey of different occupations and their tendencies in Forbes. The general leaning is this: People who want to be invisible have some dark shit going on. It’s the superpower of creeps and lechers, unlike the noble, beautiful act of flight.

That aside, it’s still a popular superpower, one that’s been featured to some degree in plenty of movies. Those movies, however, don’t often push back too hard on these assumptions. If someone’s invisible in a movie, especially a comedy, they’re almost definitely going to spend some time secretly peeking at someone else’s unmentionables.

Here are four of the creepiest invisibility moments in movies…

4 ‘The Invisible Kid’

The Invisible Kid is a teen comedy from 1988, centered around a nerdy teen, indicated by clearly false glasses, named Grover Dunn. He manages to create a powder, based on his scientist dad’s notes, that turns people invisible. If the previous description for any reason makes you want to watch this movie, I would urge you not to. It’s a combination of hard to find anywhere past pirated 320p clips and not nearly good enough to be worth tracking down.

Grover is, as is customary for a nerd in a movie, deeply in love with his neighbor, Cindy. The most interesting thing about the whole movie, by the way, is that Cindy is played by Chynna Phillips of Wilson Phillips, I assume in an ill-chosen bid to launch an acting career. Girl next door plus invisibility means you can pretty clearly see where this is headed. There is, of course, the requisite scene where Grover’s friend uses the powder to peep on Cindy changing in her bedroom. But weirdly, that’s still less creepy than the first thing the two do after discovering they can go invisible — sneaking next door to watch Cindy on a date with her boyfriend Donny. You can’t get through most 1980s comedies without somebody walking in on somebody else in their bloomers, but secretly watching two people making out with your friend? Horny jail all around.

It doesn’t help that the invisible peeping scenes are shot from the POV of the invisible character, giving them a distinctly Pornhub-y vibe.

3 ‘The Man Who Wasn’t There’

This movie originally came out in 3D, which is how you know it’s going to be really good. Given the tagline on the poster — “Being invisible gets you into spy rings, diplomatic circles and the girls’ locker room” — you’re already prepped for some unsavory invisible antics, but by the end, that’s maybe the least objectionable thing about the whole movie. This thing is a creepshow from the jump. You’d think that when it starts off with a State Department employee and a wedding, it might not be headed straight for the gutter, but it swan dives immediately.

It’s hard to choose one creepy moment, when the whole thing feels like the writer got horny 20 minutes into the script and forgot what he was working on. The main character, played by Steve Guttenberg, doesn’t need invisibility to be an absolute nightmare, hitting on his fiancée’s female relative after arriving late to his wedding. He then takes a trip to a girls’ college, which goes about how you’d expect. But the real crowning moment of ick is when the invisible Guttenberg has sex with said fiancée’s visible body, while three elderly men watch through a telescope, hootin’ and a-hollerin’.

Paying $2.99 to Amazon to watch someone pretend to French kiss an invisible man is maybe the worst financial decision I’ve ever made, and I’m not particularly good with money. The worst thing about it is, however, that they convinced actress Lisa Langlois to spend a shocking amount of time nude on screen in such a horrible movie.

2 ‘The Invisible Maniac’

This movie was somehow $2 cheaper to rent on Prime than The Man Who Wasn’t There, and somehow still didn’t make up for it. Within two minutes of the movie starting, you‘re watching a woman get undressed through a telescope from the POV of the main character, Kevin Dornwinkle — before you ever even see his face. It was at this point I had to do some brief research to make sure I was not, in fact, watching a pornographic film. By all indications, it wasn‘t designed or marketed as pornographic, but instead as a “comedy horror.”

The whole movie feels like a proof of concept that somebody who thinks being invisible would be really cool — like, presumably, the writer of this movie — warrants constant supervision. Dornwinkle, a scientist who manages to invent an invisibility serum, is also deeply, genuinely unwell, and spends the entire runtime either having dreams about naked women, peeping on naked women or murdering the entirety of the high school he’s teaching physics at.

I‘d be more embarrassed to be spotted walking out of this movie than out of a genuine porn theater, and I‘m confused as to where you’d even see something like this. The whole thing’s creepy, but the most sketch moment comes at the end (spoilers) when the female news anchor reporting on Dornwinkle’s murder spree has her top ripped off on camera by none other than the invisible Dornwinkle himself.

1 ‘The Erotic Misadventures of the Invisible Man’

Even if I could find it online, I don’t feel the need to watch the full film to give an informed opinion that it’s pretty gross. All I needed to see from this is an Everything is Terrible clip of an invisible man with a boner under a towel and a woman holding what seems to be an invisible erect penis. If this is what porn used to be, thank god for the internet.