The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

I'm not going to bore you or myself recounting the plot of this movie, as that can be easily found on wikipedia. The movie itself can be viewed on Google video in it's entirety. Instead I focus on analysis and the film's place in history.


The film sets a number of precedents for future horror movies. It presents a duo of monsters. A twisted genius and a being of physical might but little to no will. We will see this pairing a number of times on our journey. The mad scientist and his creation. The sorcerer and his familiar like servant. In Caligari we have these two combined. A scientist who behaves like a sorcerer. Another precedent set is the tendency for the monsters to be the most interesting thing about the movie. Caligari and Ceasere are certainly the two most visually interesting characters in the film. Their distinctive costumes and body language set them apart even more in a silent film where body language, costume, and makeup design are the only elements they have to work with creating these characters. This makes them elder day counterparts to the psycho killers of modern day horror movies. Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Micheal Myers all get by on the fact that they are visually distinctive creatures. This is what keeps them going despite the law of diminishing returns working against the quality each franchise, with the exception of the Friday the 13th films which had little quality to begin with.

Being of the German expressionist style, the film creates a very distinctive visual world. The town is depicted as full of sharp angles with shadow every where. Every structure is seemingly off kilter to some extent. Even the main characters apartment is full of threatening jagged angles and oddly shaped windows. This may serve to suggest the suprise twist at the end of the film, which I will not spoil here. Caligari's hideout's standout in design, always being small and confining whether it is the wagon he and ceasere spend most of the movie plotting in, his tent at the fair, or his office at the asylum. The doorways to each room have a vaginal quality to them, suggesting the mysteries of the womb. In fact the titular cabinet containing Ceasere's sleeping form is very much in accord with the design oif Frankenstein's creation chamber disscussed below. The only sets spared these threatening angles are those of Jane's home which are instead filled with rounded shapes suggesting safety and security.

The film veers toward both the subversive and the reactionary. The main story of the movie climaxes with the discovery that Caligari is the respected director of an asylum for the mad. Oddly, he and his staff seem to be the only inhabitants. It turns out he was driven to madness and obsession. The cliche of the madman running the asylum comes into play here. However, the movies twist ending would seem to undercut this subverswive message, suggesting that the fear of authority is the real madness. The movie seems to be trying to have it's own cake and eat it too. In the process, the power of the twist of who Caligari turns out to be is undercut by the second twist that comes at the end.

With it's stark, but creative sets and prototypical horror movie tropes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the seminal films, without which horror movies would not be what they are today. For that alone it desrves to be watched, but it is alkso a fairly entertaining film. Particularly the performance of Ceasere by Conraid Veidt who would go on to play Gwynnplaine in The Man Who Laughs, Jaffar in the Thief of Bagdad, and, most famously, Major Strasser in Casablanca.

Tomorrow, another masterpiece of German expressionism "Nosferatu."