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| A hypnotic poster for Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari |
QUICK REVIEW:
The story of a mad doctor, who travels around with a coffin that contains his somnambulist Cesare, who has been asleep continually for 23 years. On markets around the country, the somnambulist tell people's futures, which are often short ...
Caligari is one of my personal all-time absolute favorites. Its whole plot in the end turns out SPOILER to be a cover for an even more horrifying truth!
This German expressionist psychological horror mystery is one of the most odd, strange, artistically ambitious and visionary films ever made. It holds hypnotizing imagery, - mostly due to the elaborate, expressionistic sets that were created for it by designer Hermann Warm (The Passion of Joan of Arc/La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (1928)), but also because of its wild make-up, costumes and bizarre acting style.
Werner Krauss (Secrets of a Soul/Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926)) creates one of the best mad men of science in Dr. Caligari.
The film gets even better depending on which score you watch it with, (there are several.) I have seen one with a gorgeously weird experimental jazz score, which perfectly resonated the visual side of this one of the first and definitely still one of the best horror films of all time.
It was directed by the industrious German master director Robert Wiene (Raskolnikow (1923)).
Related post:
Here's some more striking artwork and a single still from Caligari:
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| Werner Krauss attends his somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt (Casablanca (19442))) in Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari |
Cost: 20,000 DEM / Est.18,000 $
Box office: Unknown
= A hit
[Despite an initially bad reception, with a relaunched marketing campaign that ran for a reported 6 months, Caligari came out to enthused crowds in Germany, where it became a big hit, as can be read here. It came out in most other European countries as well as USA and Japan in 1920-23. Since we don't know the box office figures, we can't know how big a hit it became exactly.]
What do you think of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?
Other marvelous early horror films that you want to recommend?
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