13 Days of First-Time Frights: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

13 Days of First-Time Frights is a series of reviews for October 2019 where Douglas Laman, in the spirit of Halloween, watches and writes about thirteen horror movies he's never seen before. These reviews will be posted each Tuesday and Thursday as well as the last three Wednesdays of October 2019.

Entry #6: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Us humans have been telling scary stories since the dawn of time. But given that cinema wasn’t invented until the end of the 19th-Century, we’ve been telling scary stories in filmmaking form for a considerably shorter period of time. Among many film scholars and historians, it’s widely agreed that the 1920 German motion picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the birth of horror cinema. Yes, this is where it all began, the equivalent to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs or Toy Story for the realm of horror cinema is none other than this Robert Wiene motion picture.

Told over six acts, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari concerns itself with the village of Holstenwall. This is where Francis (Friedrich Feher) calls home and it’s also where a local fair has managed to procure a mighty unique attraction. Hosted by the titular Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), the attraction fixates on the powers of somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) and him relaying grim prophecies to patrons. Strange attraction, right? Things get even stranger when a string of murders begin to transpire in the town. Francis begins to suspect Cesare and Caligari are behind the gruesomeness that may soon ensnare Jane (Lil Dagover), the object of Francis’ romantic affections.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari creates its scares through visual means, particular the ominous production design that makes the appearance of the village of Holstenwall as eerie as the murders transpiring within the village itself. Rare is the building or staircase here that’s brought to life with a completely straight line. Embodying every defining aspect of German Expressionism, every element of the sets has an exaggerated quality to it within The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Much like the backgrounds found in Kwaidan, Caligari uses this unique approach to visually convey that we’re watching a fable detached heavily from reality.

Watching Caligari’s visuals, it’s fascinating to see how heavily future pieces of cinema have leaned on this one’s production design sensibilities. Nightmare Before Christmas especially kept leaping into my mind right down to the textures on certain objects. Caligari didn’t just pave the way for an entire genre of storytelling, it also left an immeasurable impact on future filmmaking on a visual level. Production design isn’t the only area this production impressed visually provided you’re watching a certain copy of Dr. Caligari. The version of the film that I watched also replicated color tinting that apparently was utilized in some fashion in its original theatrical release.

This is yet another visual aspect of Dr. Caligari that manages to work divinely to instill an uneasy atmosphere. Colors also are used to enforce the aesthetics of certain environments within the Movies universe. A more restrained shade of Yellow, for instance, covers sequences set at a bureaucratic local government offer and an asylum to emphasize the everyday normalcy of these locales. More vibrant colors are utilized for scenes depicting creepier elements like Cesare to help visually differentiate them from what’s visually coded as “normal” in the world of Dr. Caligari. Modern movies like Jurassic World and Money Monster that use color grading technology to just douse their shots in a pointless light shade of blue could take a cue from the far more considerate use of various colors in Dr. Caligari.

Much of Dr. Caligari is a visual exercise, which explains why the characters are mostly broadly drawn archetypes. Sometimes that’s a flaw in a movie, but in the context of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, it feels fitting for something that’s clearly evoking the feel of an old-times Ghost Story. Director Robert Weine and writers Carl Mayer & Hans Janowitz are out to pair up bold visual touches with a classical horror tale, not reinvent the wheel in terms of what kind of characters you see in these sort of scary stories. On that front, they’ve certainly succeeded with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a trailblazing feature whose impact on cinema is still being felt about a whole century after it was first released.