The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the Source of So Much Iconic Spookiness
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
My seven year old son is obsessed with Tim Burton. Nightmare Before Christmas is his favorite film. At this point in his life, he may have spent more time dressed as Jack Skellington than as himself.
I am consequently tempted to show Declan The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and say, “See, this is where Tim Burton got all of his ideas from.”
That would be an exaggeration and a simplification, of course, but one rooted in reality. It’s hard to overstate the influence German Expressionism and movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu had on Burton’s aesthetic.
He’s not alone. The Joker’s ghoulish grin was inspired by The Man Who Laughs, a 1928 German Expressionist film starring Conrad Veidt of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Watching The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 2022 is not unlike watching recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry Rambo: First Blood, Part II in that it has been ripped off, parodied, and recycled so relentlessly through the decades that even if you haven’t seen the aforementioned films you still essentially know them.
It’s impossible to imagine the early history of music videos without The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and other German Expressionist masterpieces to steal from.
In its infancy MTV borrowed so extensively from the visual vocabulary of German Expressionism—crazy angles, wild sets, free-floating spookiness and an intense disdain for naturalism— that it essentially became the zeitgeist-capturing cable channel’s house style.
And of course it would be impossible to imagine the Goth world without German Expressionism. These dark, sinister fright flicks from Teutonic terrors went on to have an incredible legacy.
German Expressionism also had a huge impact on Nicolas Cage. It informed his career-best performance in Vampire’s Kiss and was name dropped lovingly in Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.
The film originally was even more The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari-heavy but an extended homage ended up on the cutting room floor for apparently being self-indulgent even by the film’s exceedingly lenient standards.
It’s easy to see why the film has made such an impact. It’s not a movie that moves between reality and the world of dreams and nightmares so much as it is a movie that moves confidently between infinite layers of dreams and nightmares with no use whatsoever for the dreary tedium of reality.
The film unfolds largely in flashback, as a tale told by unreliable narrator Francis (Friedrich Feher) about the surreal misfortune that has befallen him and his spooky, Ophelia-like fiancé Jane (Lil Dagover).
Once upon a time Francis competed with friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) for Jane’s affections. The friends go to a fair where Alan makes the mistake of asking Cesare (Conrad Veidt), a spooky somnambulist (that’s a fancy word for a sleepwalker) controlled by the sinister Dr. Caligari, how long he will live.
Cesare coldly informs the man, “The time is short. You die at dawn!” The sleepwalking ghoul’s prediction comes true.
Caligari has the ability to control Cesare through hypnosis. The two men are locked forever in a state of sinister symbiosis. Cesare has no control over his body or his mind. He has no will or agency of his own. He exists to serve his master.
In that respect he is terribly human even if everything else about him feels ghostly and inhuman. Francis’ friends are understandably upset by his violent demise and the way Cesare predicted it.
They investigate Dr. Caligari’s past and discover that he was obsessed with an eighteenth century mystic named Caligari who employed a sleepwalker named Cesare to commit murders on his behalf.
The present-day Cesare is dispatched to kill Jane but abducts her instead before being forced to drop her after being pursued by an angry mob.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari takes places partially in a psychiatric institution but creates such an overwhelming sense of dread and madness that it feels like its entire world consists of one giant madhouse where it is difficult, if not downright impossible, to delineate between the inmates and the staff.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari accordingly concludes with what is known as the business as a real switcheroo.
Francis’ story ends and we discover that he is an inmate in a mental institution alongside a now docile Cesare and Jane. Mad, murderous Dr. Caligari, meanwhile, is now the seemingly sane and non-murderous director of the nut house.
What is reality? What is fantasy? Who is sane? Who is mad? Is Dr. Caligari a villain or is that villainy someone else’s projection? Who the hell knows? Does it matter?
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is less interested in answers than in mystery and mood. It takes the stylization of silent film to exhilarating new extremes by creating a world where nothing is real or natural or conventional and everything feels unmistakably off.
Everything is slanted and abstract, stooped and sinister. It feels as if the film’s doomed souls are walking slowly and methodically through giant paintings or enormous sculptures rather than traditional sets or an actual village.
At the time of its release, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was seen as a potent allegory for the horrors of World War I but in the ensuing decades it became associated with another sinister puppet-master who hypnotized the public into doing his evil bidding with his words and his stormy charisma: Adolf Hitler.
As long as evil men of power and influence use their ability to manipulate the masses into killing for them,The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari will remain timely and relevant.
It’s a hundred and one year old film that has never stopped invading our dreams and collective subconscious. It never will.
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