The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
HORROR-THON 2021 • THEY’RE HERE
8/10
DIRECTOR: Robert Wiene
STARRING: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher
RELEASED: 1920
RUNTIME: 1 hour, 7 minutes
WATCH ON: Shudder, Tubi, The Roku Channel, Plex
SCARE LEVEL: Unsettling more than scary
DESIGN INSPO LEVEL: Extremely high
This movie looks like someone built a town out of broken shards of paper and asked it to be scary. Nothing in it is straight - the windows are jagged triangles, the streets lean, and the shadows are painted onto the walls. It’s more than a century old, and it still looks like nothing else.
A young man named Francis tells a story about his hometown. A traveling showman named Dr. Caligari comes to the town fair with an act: a somnambulist named Cesare, who has been asleep for 23 years and can supposedly predict the future.
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Francis’s friends as Cesare how long he’ll live. Cesare says until dawn, and that night the friend is murdered.
More killings follow. Francis becomes convinced Caligari is sending Cesare out at night to kill. Cesare creeps into the bedroom of Francis’s fiancée Jane and carries her off across the rooftops. Francis follows Caligari to the local asylum and learns something about who’s really running it.
Then the movie flips everything you thought you knew in the last few minutes.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
This is a silent movie that will not bore you, which is saying a lot. It’s barely over an hour, and every frame looks like a painting. It’s hard not to pause to look at the sets alone.
Cesare is the reason to watch. He’s played by Conrad Veidt, who later played a role in Casablanca. Here, he’s tall and pale, in a black leotard, with dark-rimmed eyes, and he moves like his body is being pulled on strings. He’s the blueprint for every goth boy who came after. You can draw a line from him directly to Edward Scissorhands.
I first watched this in a film class a long time ago, and we talked about the twist ending for a bit. It’s often cited as one of the first in film. It’s just one of those endings that makes you rewatch the whole thing in your head.
If you’ve never watched a silent film, start here. The tinted scenes shift from blue to amber, and the whole thing looks like a fever dream.
FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY
The final look and feel of the movie was based as much on having a low budget as it was on creative inspiration and expressionism. Electricity was strictly rationed in post-WWI Germany when the film was being shot, so Robert Wiene ended up painting light beams on backdrops. Also, shooting on confined film sets forced him to use unique camera angles.