Along with Nosferatu, Caligari is one of the cornerstones of horror film. Like Nosferatu, it has become so familiar, especially its expressionist sets, that it’s easy to forget just how powerful, pacy and scary it is, and how marvellous it looks, especially in this new cleaned up version from the excellent Eureka cinema, keepers of the flame.
It creates a fantastic world of its own, right from the opening shots. A young man tells an older friend the story of what happened to his fiancée, who seems to be in a trance of some sort. We go back in time to when the circus came to town, featuring a ring master who has a somnambulist at his disposal, a freakishly tall, gaunt man (Veidt) who can be woken from his trance and tell a punter his future.
The circus coincides with a series of horrific murders, one of which the somnambulist predicts. Is the ringmaster behind it all, with the sleeper as his puppet?
Told over six acts, it’s a lean, bleak tale but it creates a fantastically gloomy mood and sticks to it. The acting is very much of its time, but what is remarkable is the glorious theatrical sets, some of which can still be seen at the Babelsberg studios in Berlin. Chimneys bend, windows are angular, doors are triangular, pathways are straight out of a gothic fairytale. Now it would be cool, for 1920 it’s remarkable. The scene where Veidt breaks into the heroine’s bedroom and carries her onto a rooftop has rightly passed into film history, but to see it again is still thrilling.
Seeing Veidt in his trademark role is also extraordinary. He has the body of a ballet dancer, and, apparently the strength he carries the heroine like she weighs nothing and seeing him slither round corners in his dark clothes is quite a sight. It was to be the role that haunted him for the rest of his short life, he admitted he never quite threw it off and it’s easy to see why.
Clearly something was going on in 1920s Germany, and it was pretty dark. The First World War had just ended, with its terrible toll, and the decadent Berlin of the 1920s was just getting underway, and this film is the perfect example of just how bad the undercurrent of feeling was. Generally credited with being the first full-on horror film, it still packs a weighty punch. See it in a cinema if you can, it’s a piece of history.
Overall verdict: Most people call it a classic of German expressionist cinema, actually it’s just a stone cold classic. Brilliant, and still shocking.
Reviewer: Mike Martin