There’s a scene in the first half of The Invisible Man, a psychological horror film that reinvents the HG Wells character as an abusive ex-turned-stalker , when the protagonist, Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss), realizes she’s not alone in her room. She can’t be sure she hears breathing, or the slight brush of footfalls; she definitely can’t see anyone. But she can feel something is wrong – the gut-level sense one gets from having another heartbeat in the room draws her from bed. She checks the living room, the kitchen, the porch outside – there’s no one she can see, only an invisible person’s cold exhale on her shoulder. The scene is played for suspense – it’s the first introduction to the movie’s villain as invisible tormenter – but it also, for me, conjures a more relatable fear. The Invisible Man (her ex-husband, Adrian) paws through her room and touches her things; he strips the covers as she sleeps and photographs her without her knowledge. Waking up, she can sense something is wrong and yet, she has no idea how bad it is.

The Invisible Man is a far from perfect film with a second half that devolves into a messy action thriller, but while watching this quietly chilling scene, as an iPhone camera flashes across Cecilia’s sleeping body, I was chilled by the horrifying, and oft-considered, possibility of being watched at any given moment. The fear of surveillance – made ever present with today’s technology, lack of regulation and access to mounds of data – is implicit in the way I often think about myself moving throughout the world, as in: I wonder what about my life is or could be seen. Could someone film me changing, or posing in the mirror, or eating out of an ice-cream tub in my bed? If someone tried, what could they find about me online? If someone installed a camera in my apartment, or a bug in my phone, would I notice? How many photos of me exist that I don’t know about? My online privacy measures are haphazard and reactive, exploitable but (I assume) boring, like everyone else’s – being mass-hacked or traceable is, by now, a simmering anxiety; being specifically targeted by one stealthy person with a camera, especially as a woman, one of my worst fears.

Penn Badgley in You. Photograph: ©2018 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.

The Invisible Man and shows such as Netflix’s You, in which a handsome, too-good-to-be-true bookseller warps “knowing what’s best for you” into elaborate stalking and kidnapping routines (getting access to texts and emails, spying through windows, along with the mundane social media obsessions) can be highly implausible, with an air of material best left for a guilty binge. But they are popular (You was a word-of-mouth hit on Netflix two years after its run on Lifetime), and compulsively watchable, in part because they tap into the swamp of fear that is modern surveillance – which is to say, modern life. Recent news coverage has investigated how dating sites save your conversations, or how automatic location services on your phone unwittingly make you a moving, pinpointed target, or how fraught developments in facial recognition technology could spell the end of public anonymity. Law enforcement agencies across the country have already purchased an app which pairs images – security tape footage, a photobomb – with a database of millions of pictures scraped from sites such as Facebook, Venmo and YouTube. The New York Times investigation into the app said the tool, in the wrong hands, could potentially “identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew”.

We seem to be living at a time when a series of technologies and seemingly innocuous shares have amassed into a sludge pile, drowning out public anonymity or individual privacy. This is all obviously less severe and traumatic than an abusive ex stalking a woman in her bedroom, but it’s the soup of surveillance and speculation that The Invisible Man boils down to its most extreme and (currently) impossible degree; it’s not yet possible for someone to don an invisibility suit and literally breathe over your shoulder at home, but it is very possible to see the real-world steps that could, in theory, facilitate unwanted visibility. The Invisible Man is a physical manifestation and exaggeration of the queasiness with surveillance capitalism: the feeling of someone watching you, of someone is stringing together the clues you didn’t mean to leave, of someone – a person, a company, the algorithm – knowing more about you than you know about yourself.

Of course, gaslighting and stalking women are not new concepts for film and TV – the term gaslighting comes from the 1940 film Gaslight – but the current era of social media and location tracking, the proliferation of lenses and security cameras, and the many, many access points to secure information or communication online (texts, Facebook messages, emails) means the methods of stalking and harassment are ever-expanding, insidious and invisible. There’s a reason You was such a runaway hit on Netflix (their fifth most watched show in 2019), and that The Invisible Man is projected to make between $25-35m in its opening weekend (easily recouping its $7m budget): they explore a fear many women inherently swallow as they make their way through the world now.

You addictively targeted the vulnerabilities fostered by an easy, unencumbered digital life; in hiding the abusive ex in plain sight, The Invisible Man embodies the very real dread of digital harassment and stalking. There’s a fine line between exploring a latent, real-world anxiety through the extreme and exploiting a woman’s pain on-screen – one The Invisible Man crosses by the end as Cecilia becomes, despite Moss’s performance, more of a terrorized punching bag and action pawn than person. But while its action-movie flourishes and invisibility suit may be the stuff of silly, popcorn-cinema fantasy, The Invisible Man will strike a chord with many of us because the surveillance fears it explores – pictures you don’t know about, your ability to be known and found – are increasingly, chillingly real.