It’s a pleasing synchronicity that HG Wells’s first, seminal novel, The Time Machine, was published in 1895, at the very moment that Louis and Auguste Lumière were perfecting their Cinématographe in time for its public unveiling on 28 December that year.

Wells’s time traveller, in his attempt to convince a sceptical audience of the possibility of time travel, shows them a series of photographs of a man taken at different ages; if photography allowed the capture and preservation of vanished moments, then cinema would achieve something more – the projection of the rapt viewer to the other side of the world or beyond, back into the past or forward into the future. Cinema was a way of moving through both space and time, and Wells’s writing career would run in tandem with the new medium for its first half-century; by the time he died in 1946, mainstream cinema had established all of the rules and storytelling techniques it still employs today, and the kinds of speculative fiction used by Wells to dramatise scientific and social ideas would have become just one entertainment genre among many.

It’s no surprise that a writer of visionary tales should have found his work adapted for the screen; indeed, by the mid-1930s, Wells was taking part in the process himself, collaborating on a film adaptation of his own The Shape of Things to Come.

The British, though, weren’t the first to get a Wells film off the ground; the new medium’s infancy was dominated by the French, whether it was the ‘realism’ of the Lumières’ little slices of Gallic life or the screen fantasies conjured up by cinema’s first magician, Georges Méliès who, in 1902, made Le voyage dans la lune. This short film, in which an intrepid professor and his crew are fired from a huge gun into the Moon’s right eye (above), is generally accepted as the first science fiction film. Jules Verne’s 1865 book From the Earth to the Moon was no doubt an inspiration, but Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, which had been published just a year previously, was an even more obvious influence on Méliès’s film.

After this cheeky bit of borrowing, it was a good while before another Wells film appeared. Once again, it was a version of The First Men in the Moon, which became the first Wells adaptation to be produced in the UK, this time in an author-sanctioned Gaumont British production of 1919, co-directed by South African-born actor Bruce Gordon and JLV Leigh (who had acted in one of George Pearson’s Ultus films, Britain’s answer to the popular French Fantomas series).

Just as Wells chose largely to abandon speculative fiction for ‘proper’ novels and ideological treatises, the silent cinema gradually turned away from the fantastic imagery of the early trick films in its search for longer, more coherent narrative forms; it was to be some time before further attempts to film Wells’s seminal SF stories were made; but as the infant cinema plundered stage and literature for likely source material, adaptations of Wells novels – such as Harold M Shaw’s Kipps (1921), and Maurice Elvey’s The Passionate Friends (1922) – began to appear. Perhaps the oddest product of this period was a trio of short, quirky comedies directed in 1928 by left-wing intellectual and Film Society founder Ivor Montagu from scripts written by Wells for bohemian actress (and future ‘Bride of Frankenstein’) Elsa Lanchester. In two of them, Daydreams and Bluebottles, she appeared opposite soul-mate and husband-to-be Charles Laughton, in his very first film roles (as a Rajah and a gangster).

Laughton, of course, would star five years later in the first really significant film – as well as the first talkie – adapted from a Wells book, The Island of Dr Moreau – retitled The Island of Lost Souls in its screen incarnation. The 1933 movie, made in Hollywood and directed by Erle C Kenton (whose long, if relatively undistinguished, career would later include some of the Universal horrors of the 1940s), remains a classic, boasting one of Laughton’s most memorable performances; by turns urbane, chilling and strangely pitiable, his Moreau remains one of the screen’s classic human monsters. Wells, though, hated the film – the horrors of which are more deliriously physical than anything in his original – and was no doubt perfectly pleased when it was banned in Britain, where censors claimed it was “against nature”. “So is Mickey Mouse,” was Elsa Lanchester’s shrewd response.

Even though Island wasn’t a commercial success, it seemed to alert film studios in both Hollywood and Britain to the screen potential of Wells’s fiction. 1933 also saw James Whale – two years after the success of his seminal Frankenstein – delivering a brilliantly inventive film version of The Invisible Man. Claude Raines made his Hollywood debut as Wells’s mad scientist in one of the best performances of his distinguished career, and the film featured special effects that must have been literally breathtaking at the time, given how well they still hold up today. With its typically 1930s mixture of chills and comedy, the film was still too lightweight for Wells’s taste; this was a situation he’d soon get a chance to rectify.

On the other side of the Atlantic, 1936 saw Wells – at the height of his fame as an idealogue and social prophet – enjoying his closest brush with cinema, teaming up with flamboyant Hungarian émigré Alexander Korda for a pair of ambitious movies quite unlike anything that had emerged from British studios up to that time. The first was Things to Come, a simultaneously impressive and misguided attempt on Wells’s part to take elements from his 1933 book The Shape of Things to Come and graft them onto a wordy story about a catastrophic war in the near future, its terrible aftermath and the eventual salvation of mankind.

Korda always thought on a grand scale – he’d built Europe’s most modern and best-equipped film studios at Denham and tackled Henry VIII, Rembrandt and Catherine the Great as film subjects; hardly surprising, then, that he could see both cinematic potential and cultural kudos in putting Wells’s grand sociological visions of the future on the screen. Korda offered, according to Wells, “to make a film which was, as far as humanly possible, exactly as I dictated”.

It was to be a task that Wells, by his own admission, found far more difficult than he’d imagined; and for Korda, director William Cameron Menzies and the rest of Wells’s collaborators, producing a movie that was to deliver both an evening’s entertainment and Wells’s great message was no easy task.

The resulting film, though, was a critical (if not a commercial) success, and is still a unique and fascinating screen vision of the future from a time when there was little else with which to compare it. Particularly striking are Vincent Korda’s designs – from the eerily prescient blitzing of ‘Everytown’ in 1940 to the final vision of a pristine technological future – and Arthur Bliss’s brilliant score; although Wells had worked closely with them on every detail, they (and director Cameron Menzies) deserve much credit for breathing some life into what always threatens to turn into a long and rather pompous lecture.

The film’s ending, in which Raymond Massey’s appallingly smug Cabal imposes his vision of the future on society at large, never fails to chill me to the bone; it seems far from likely that this was Wells’s intention, given his enthusiastically technocratic vision, but in John and Oswald Cabal he created a disturbing image of the dangerous arrogance at the heart of a ‘progressive’ scientific world view.

Wells’s second collaboration with Korda was the following year’s The Man Who Could Work Miracles, a heavy-handed comic fantasy based on Wells’s short story. It starred the amiable Roland Young, ably supported by such English eccentrics as Ernest Thesiger and Ralph Richardson (the latter also one of the stars of Things To Come), but – despite Korda keeping Wells away from Denham as much as possible – it still veers between a whimsical Wellsian ‘what if?’ and a message-heavy Wellsian lecture, although the comic incidents and inventive special effects mean it remains eminently watchable.

The coming of the war had a profound effect on British cinema, with the “dream factory” products of the 1930s largely replaced by a new, socially informed brand of realism that proved to be fertile ground for films derived from Wells’s novels of ordinary English life.

In 1941, Carol Reed directed a solid version of Kipps starring Michael Redgrave and Phyllis Calvert; the film even boasted a filmed prologue of Wells himself, though this was cut prior to release. Wells had also been collaborating with Lance Sieveking (father of FT founding editor Paul Sieveking, and adapter of several Wells stories, including Mr Polly, Kipps, Tono Bungay and The War in the Air for radio) on a script based on The History of Mr Polly to be made by RKO; in the event, it was never to see the light of day. Two Cities Films delivered Anthony Pelissier’s version of The History of Mr Polly in 1949, three years after Wells’s death. It remains a charming film, with a lovely, untypical performance from John Mills (getting away from gung-ho military parts) in the title role. The same year saw David Lean contributing a typically polished, though not entirely successful, version of The Passionate Friends, starring a visible Claude Rains and a glacial Ann Todd.

In the US, though, it was a dumbed-down version of the SF Wells that proved dominant; in fact, the only Wells-inspired films of the 1940s were three inferior sequels designed to capitalise on the success of James Whale’s 1933 film: The Invisible Man Returns (1940), Invisible Agent (1942) and The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944); the series ended in an undignified manner (as did the careers of many once-great Universal ‘monsters’) in a 1951 meeting with Lou and Bud in Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man.

The Cold War climate of the 1950s saw one of the best-remembered of all Wells adaptations, the 1953 version of The War of the Worlds, which arrived on a tide of alien invasion movies feeding off – and into – the same cultural anxieties which, post-Kenneth Arnold, were also producing a wave of UFO sightings across North America and Europe. Produced by George Pal and directed by Byron Haskin, the film was the first since Things to Come to utilise cinema’s growing repertoire of special effects to bring Wells’s literary visions to life on the screen. In true Hollywood style, the film updates and transplants Wells’s story to 1950s America, turns the novel’s tripods into (the by now more familiar) flying saucer-type craft, and adds some irrelevant love interest; nevertheless, it remains a highly enjoyable genre classic of its time with some chilling moments.

Pal soon began planning another Wells film, although it would be some years before the project came to fruition. This time Pal himself climbed into the director’s chair for what remains perhaps the best-loved of all Wells adaptations, the 1960 The Time Machine. While it inevitably dilutes some of Wells’s ideas (and ends on a far more hopeful note than the book) the film does stick somewhat closer to the original than is usually the case. It’s also full of bold special effects and is never less than entertaining in its treatment of Wells’s evolutionary themes.

In many ways, The Time Machine was the high water mark of cinematic interest in Wells’s speculative fiction; in the years since 1960 – despite a growing interest in SF cinema, his work has remained strangely untapped, at least in terms of quality. There have been numerous Moreaus, umpteen Invisible Men (including one faithful BBC TV version in 1984) and a mediocre remake of The Time Machine directed by Wells’s own grandson, but none of them, frankly, have been terribly good.

Amongst the absolute stinkers of the Wells film canon, we might include the 1964 First Men in the Moon, Food of the Gods (1976) and Empire of the Ants (1977), while the most amusing oddities are probably Turkey’s 1955 entry, The Invisible Man in Istanbul, and the softcore epic The Erotic Time Machine (2002).

Although Wells continues – often indirectly – to inspire writers and filmmakers, it remains to be seen whether anyone – Stephen Spielberg included – can actually take one of his seminal books and make a decent movie out of it.