Review: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari wasn't the first horror film by a longshot--numerous filmmakers had tried to scare their audiences, from the bullet-shaped spaceship Georges Melies jammed into the eye of the Man in the Moon in A Trip to the Moon to Thomas Edison's version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to several cracks at Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Nor is Caligari the best example of silent horror--many of the genre films of the following decade would eclipse Caligari in terms of story and shocks (especially Murnau's Nosferatu).

But no matter what you think of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it probably qualifies as the single most influential film in the history of cinema.

Think I'm overstating? Not only did it shade the monster films, in both Germany and America, that followed it--The Golem, Waxworks, Phantom of the Opera, Frankenstein, Dracula (both English and Spanish versions), The Old Dark House, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mummy, etc.--but it continues to exert its influence to this very day in movies like Dark City and the first two Batman films (and most of Tim Burton's other films, too).

And there are plenty of movies in between that bear the mark of this early film example of German Expressionism, an art movement in which angles and perspectives are exaggerated to provoke emotional responses. The transfer of this artistic approach to film manifests itself in the form of interior sets with odd angles and painted-on shadows, characters lit from below (as if the lighting were emanating from the ground--or from Hell itself) and nightmarish scenarios in which evil is not merely a concept, but a tangible, living presence. (Such techniques also found their ways into non-horror films, especially the "film noir" crime dramas of the 1940s.)

The basic story: a couple of young students (Fredrich Feher and Hans Heinz von Twardowski) and the girl they both adore (Lil Dagover) go to a local fair and encounter Caligari (Werner Krauss), a hypnotist who keeps a somnambulist--a sleepwalker--in the enclosure of the title. The somnambulist, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), can predict the future, it's said, and when he tells one of the students that he'll only live until the following dawn, it turns out to be true. It probably doesn't help that Cesare helps his own prediction come true by leaving his cabinet (on Caligari's orders) and murders said student himself. While the surviving student looks for the killer, Cesare continues to kill and then kidnaps the girl, marching through dreamlike sets and pursued by angry villagers (the first of many, many such pursuits in cinema). Cesare falls over dead for no obvious reason, the girl is saved, and Caligari is revealed to be an asylum director obsessed with an ancient story of a hypnotist who controlled a somnambulist and used him to carry out evil deeds.

If this were all there were to the story, Caligari would be a nightmarish experiment and probably would hold up far better than it does. Unfortunately, this central story is bookended with the story of a young man (Feher, the surviving student in the story) committed to an asylum. This story explains the other, central story away as a delusion in the mind of the young man, thus robbing it of all of its power to confuse and frighten the audience and undercutting the possible comparisons that could be drawn to the recently concluded World War I.

This also qualifies as a dubious first in horror cinema, as many other movies, especially those of James Whale in the 1930s, would be re-edited, reshot and otherwise fucked with to make them more conventional and commercial.

Everything is safe and normal, you see--it's all the ravings of a paranoid mind and nothing more.

Still, you can't deny the power of the meat in the Caligari sandwich. Few other films convey the off-kilter look (even the title cards are distorted and angular) and logic of nightmares the way this movie does. (Orson Welles's adaptation of Kafka's The Trial is probably the closest, but even that film announces itself, through voiceover by Welles, that it's all a dream.) If only director Robert Weine hadn't been forced to tell us that this was a nightmare and nothing more, Caligari might have held up as a truly scary movie, instead of influencing countless movies with its visual style while reducing itself to a footnote and a curiosity to be sought out only by film students and horror-film completists--instead of being "just" a starting point for all the dreams and screams on the immediate cinematic horizon.

But The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari continues to fascinate, more than 80 years after its premiere in Germany, as a recent successful re-release on DVD amply proves. Caligari may not hold up as well as some of the film that immediately followed it, but without Caligari, they may not have followed at all.