13 Nights of Shocktober: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 1: Silent Night, "Spirits surround us on every side..." 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

I always like to include a silent film in my Shocktober viewing since they can be as spooky and scary as modern horror films. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is maybe the most visually interesting movie I’ve ever seen and is certainly one of the eeriest films I’ve seen. The first time I saw this movie was in a film history class in college. I found it strange and creepy then and I still do now. It influenced the look and style of later horror and fantasy films both in Germany and abroad throughout the rest of the silent era and into the early sound era though no film would quite match its extreme visual distortions. Those films would of course influence later horror films and so forth until the present.

Directed by Robert Wiene in 1920, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the prime example of German Expressionism in film, a visual style in which characters and settings are distorted and out of joint. The film is set in a town on a pointy hill covered with sharp angular houses; it is obviously a painting on a backdrop, and we are meant to know so. Doors are triangular and slanted, windows resemble rhombuses, zigzag lines are meant to represent grass, and chimneys are tilted. There is not a single aspect of any set that is not distorted in some way. 

The movie begins with an old man and young man sitting on a bench outdoors. The old man tells the young man that the world is full of spirits. The young man, Francis, then tells him his own story of how he came to lose his fiancé. The mysterious and sinister looking Dr. Caligari (who with his top hat, cane, and stout figure resembles the Batman villain, the Penguin) applies for a permit to showcase his somnambulist, Cesare, who has been asleep all 23 years that he has been alive. Caligari awakens Cesare from a coffin (or cabinet) before a crowd touting that Cesare, who wears all black and has a very pale face, knows the answer to any question. A friend of Francis's asks when he will die. The somnambulist replies…before the next morning. The prediction comes true; the friend is murdered. Caligari has total control over the somnambulist and uses him to carry out murder and other sinister acts. When Cesare abducts Francis’s fiancé from her bed I was reminded of the scene in King Kong where Kong picks Fay Wray out of her room and carries her away. As Francis follows Caligari to learn more about the sinister doctor the plot thickens, and even twists, and the film only gets stranger.

The horror in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari comes from its distorted depiction of reality. It puts you in an uneasy mood right from the start and you feel as though you are in a surreal nightmare. As the film goes on you realize that there is no explanation for the bizarre shapes of things man-made and nature-made; this is simply the shape of the world. That daytime scenes are in a hazy yellow-orange filter and nights in an eerie blue just adds to the curious, but creepy, atmosphere of the film. This is a genuinely spooky, but not-too-scary movie that is also an important part of film history and an excellent film to watch this Shocktober.