In 1960 H. G. Wells’s classic novel became a classic film. The Time Machine was produced and directed by George Pal, legendary for his sci-fi films, especially the 1953 adaptation of Wells’s War of the Worlds, which Pal produced and which was nominated for three Academy Awards. Rod Taylor stars in The Time Machine as the young British inventor H. George Wells, whose skeptical friends laugh at the thought of him launching himself into unknown worlds of the future. With an enormous clock as a backdrop, he rides through time, bypassing the two World Wars and a third nuclear and apocalyptic one in the then-future 1967. Wells used his novel to consider the social gap between the idle elite and the impoverished laboring class; Pal explores the Cold War fears of his day. Arriving in the year 802,701, the young scientist first encounters the Eloi race, including the beautiful Weena (Yvette Mimieux), who tells him of the subterranean Morlocks. The adventure culminates in an all-out battle between the effete Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks. The Time Machine earned an Oscar for Best Special Effects, which remain fairly effective even by today’s standards.

In 2002, more than a century after Wells wrote about time travel, his great-grandson Simon Wells directed another film adaptation of The Time Machine. Guy Pearce stars as Alexander Hartdegen, a Columbia professor whose fiancee Emma (Sienna Guillory) is murdered in Central Park. Driven by the hope of traveling to the past to save her, Hartdegen bases his time-defying device upon Einstein’s theories. Unable to rescue Emma, he travels eight thousand centuries into the future to explore the fate of humanity; the great machine (replete with gold fixtures, gauges, levers, mirrors, and glass) hurtles through a landscape that itself whirls and shifts until it finally becomes positively primeval. In this version, the moon has fallen into the earth, which results in Homo sapiens being divided into two races, the Eloi aboveground and the Morlocks in the dark recesses underneath. The future is modeled after Pal’s vision, but the pale-skinned, blonde-haired Eloi of the 1960 film are here replaced by a sturdy, brown-skinned race. The evil leader of the Eloi-eating Morlocks, a species that can leap great distances, is played by a menacing Jeremy Irons. Again, the young scientist falls in love with a beautiful Eloi woman, Mara, played by Samantha Mumba. The humanist Hartdegen teaches Mara to fight back, and she likewise teaches him not to dwell in the past. Stunningly photographed, the film is an apt rejuvenation of and homage to Wells’s classic.

The golden age of horror films featured unforgettable celluloid personalities such as Count Dracula, the Wolf Man, and, perhaps most memorably, the monster from Frankenstein. Often omitted from the list is the title character of H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man, brought to the silver screen in 1933. This horror classic was directed by James Whale, who also directed Frankenstein ( 1931 ) and around whom the 1998 film Gods and Monsters revolves. Given that these weird characters, including the Invisible Man, have appeared in a deluge of increasingly silly sequels and remakes, it is surprising just how faithful Whale’s original film is to Wells’s text. The Invisible Man opens, like the novel, with a mysterious man—his face obscured by bandages, sunglasses, and a false nose—seeking solace from a blizzard in an English pub. The film at first focuses on the bizarre appearance of Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) as he eats his dinner and checks into a room, which he turns into a science lab. After he gives the hostess a taste of his surly manners—he has, after all, been rendered insane by the invisibility drug “monocaine”—a mob of pub boys and police barge into his room. But Griffin outwits them all by shedding his bandages and clothing, and pulling slapstick pranks as he makes his escape. The invisibility is pulled off with entertaining special effects: a bicycle riding itself, footprints appearing in the snow, etc. A young Gloria Stuart (Titanic) plays Griffin’s love interest, Flora Cran ley But the real story lies in the charming spectacle of invisibility itself, a technique that his been duplicated in numerous motion pictures since.