Dreamlike horror classic. One of the first German Expressionist films and still among the movement’s freakiest specimens. Some call it the first art film. It may also qualify as the first cult film by virtue of playing a Paris theater for seven straight years in the 1920s.
Among surreal painted scenery and storybook sets, a young man investigates a series of murders that he believes creepy old Dr. Caligari committed via a psychic somnambulist whom he exploits in a carnival act. The somnambulist is Cesare, a pale, black-clad stick-figure—call him Edward Sleepyhands—under Caligari’s command, and purported to have spent twenty-three years in a state of constant sleep. To director Robert Wiene, this was a horror film about insanity. To writers Hanz Janowitz and Carl Meyer, two World War I veterans turned pacifist, it was conceived as a metaphor for how governments send their military out to kill. To audiences and critics at the time, it was a sensation. No one had ever seen anything like it.
By modern standards, the pace is slow and the presentation is stagey (you get about two close-up shots total here), but this can get under your skin if you’re in the mood. It’s weird and creepy right from its first minute and it only gets further out from there. Also, the influential set design—the work of artists Walter Reiman and Walter Rohrig, with architect Hermann Warm—which looks more like an Expressionist painting come to life than anything resembling the real world is still startling almost a century later.