In 1920, most silent films were of the garden-variety, straightforward tales with linear plot lines. They were intended to be sheer entertainment, with little emotional depth, and depicted events in worlds at least recognizable to our own. Then The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was released, which –going by the above standards -- should have been a disaster. The sets of the film were made entirely out of cardboard with wild, child-like painting adorning the walls. The plot was not meant to offer an entertaining escape from the modern world, but to get inside the heads of the audience so deeply that they question their own sanity. And on top of it all, the genius of Fritz Lang (Metropolis, M), turned the film down in lieu of another project leaving the film in the hands of the obscure director, Robert Wiene. With all this against it, it’s hard to imagine that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari would become the blue book standard that all horror movies, be it classic or modern, are measured by.

The plot, sinister and shocking even to a modern audience, made the film quite controversial for its time. A state fair arrives in town and an unknown street performer wants to perform. He is a somnabulist, a person who has the ability to awake those in a dead sleep. His sleeping beauty, Cesare, unfortunately has a ghastly trick – if you ask him for a prediction, you die at dawn. From there the movie drags the reader from plot twist to plot twist, until what seemed to be a straight-forward “crazy guy killing people story” becomes an intricate story that chips away at the audience’s visions of insanity and sanity, reality and fantasy. A film that makes you think or feel is commonplace. However when a film emerges that forces you to see a side of the tale that you were too blinded by your own prejudices and beliefs to see, it becomes a steppingstone for the genre it represents. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was one of the first steppingstones for horror.

The story’s effectiveness stems from the writer, Hans Janowitz. Allegedly, he received the idea for the film while at a fair. He saw a scary, haggled man looming in the shadows of the tents. The next day, he heard that a young girl was murdered at the fair. When he went to the funeral, that same man was seen in the shadows of the funeral, lurking much like a guilty man remorseful of a brutal crime. If this story is true, it explains why this film is one of the few that survived from this time period (Caligari was made in 1920. The great majority of films from 1920 and before are now lost and forgotten). Caligari survives because Janowitz struck a chord that transcends the conventions of the time. Namely, Janowitz tapped into a real human primordial fear. Granted, the fear stemmed from an overactive imagination (there was never any proof that this scary man killed the girl), but the fear of “what’s hiding in the shadows” causes spines to tingle regardless whether it’s 1920 or 2005. Caligari plays off of this fear, which is why it endures because of its timeless relevance, not just because it was one of the first contributions to our genre.

The most distinctive feature of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is its expressionist set design. Overall the set has a macabre fun house feel to it – terrifying while you are immersed inside of it, but also giving you an illusion that you will eventually find the exit back to safety. This feeling increases if you purchase the version with the new music score by the unmatchable Kevin Slick (available at www.creepyclassics.com), as his score is brilliantly based on a string of notes that are best described as a “malfunctioning jack-n-the-box”, ready to spring and scare the crap out of you when you least expect it. The abstract markings adorning the buildings’ walls leap right out of Picasso’s and Dali’s collective nightmares. This bizarre, seemingly willy-nilly set design rattles the subconscious because it blurs the lines between reality and a dream state. Most movies that involve a dream state, a subconscious state, or a state of insanity, make it abundantly clear that the images are not real. The set of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari doesn’t reveal whether this place is real or not, making the viewer uncomfortable. I would like to think these horrible events are simple a bad dream, given the dreamish oddities of the buildings, the triangle-shaped doors, and the helter-skelter paint strokes coating the walls. However, I can’t shake the feeling that this place truly exists given by the twinges of reality (a skeleton, an office, a common garden).

As if the ambiguity of the realism-imaginary line of demarcation in this film’s set design wasn’t emotionally taxing enough, this same ambiguity casts a nervous doubt on the realism of the film’s events. This comes to a peak in the scene where Cesare attacks Jane. We could be watching real events, as Cesare appears just human enough to be real. But then we notice the environment surrounding Jane and Cesare (a bedroom so vast in size, height, that it could not possibly exist) and the way Cesare is walking (gliding, almost floating in a supernatural fashion), and we question ourselves. Is this another dream? Or are these horrendous events occurring? Wiene plays on this doubt even in the costume choices for this scene. Jane, wearing a white angel-like dress, and Cesare, adorned in black, makes the scene look like not just one woman’s struggle for her life, but the ultimate struggle of good versus evil. Just when the audience is thoroughly uneasy, Wiene, as if to drop his pants and moon the audience’s sanity, commits the ultimate crime to our consciousness -- he makes the insane asylum in the film have the exact same look as the surrounding environment. So now, since the audience can not tell the difference between reality and imagination, he suggests that we too are crazy. No director in the decades to follow can screw with their audiences’ minds better than Wiene.

In addition to the sheer depth this film exhibits, it was also the springboard for several horror movie scare tactics we now take for granted. For example, this film was the first to integrate the effective “shadow killing” technique (camera panning to a structure reflecting just the shadow images of a murder taking place). Perhaps more importantly, this movie changed madmen storylines forever. Prior to this film, madmen were determined to be mad by an external source, be it another character or text cards. The Cabinet of Dr Caligari was the first to get inside of the head of a madman and show his thoughts visually (namely, the scene with the maniacally animated letters of “Caligari” during the film’s climax). This scene has since been reconditioned in some form in almost every “madman movie” from 1921 to modern days.

How does Dr. Caligari end? Is it real or not? These questions I cannot answer for you, because it is a surprise. More importantly, it is still surprising to the modern viewer. Just when you think you have the film figured out, it takes a left turn ending at an unexpected climax. To call this film inventive, pioneering, and influential is an understatement, even though it is all of those. This film took filmmaking to an emotional depth no one at that point could have possibly foreseen or achieved. If you have not seen this film, you simply can’t call yourself a horror fan. This film defines arthouse horror and became the film in which every expressionist director and writer is indebted. Rent it this season and enjoy one of the “mother ships” of our genre.