Robert Wiene

In a German village, a series of murders follows the arrival of a fairground showman named Dr. Caligari, who displays a sleepwalker named Cesare and claims he can answer any question. Cesare is made to kill at night. The story is told by a young man named Francis, and the truth of what he describes is called into question by the ending. The film defined German Expressionist cinema. Every set was painted with sharp angles and distorted perspective, with no right angles, so that the world itself looks like it is bending. The visual style was a direct influence on film noir and on horror for the next century. Werner Krauss plays Caligari and Conrad Veidt plays Cesare; both performances are unsettling and physical. The film is in the public domain as a pre-1930 work.

Horror · Silent

Robert Wiene, the director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, turned Maurice Renard's novel into a late Expressionist horror about a concert pianist whose hands are crushed in a train wreck and replaced with those of an executed murderer. Conrad Veidt plays Orlac as a man slowly convinced that the graft has passed the killer's violence into his own body, his long fingers curling and twitching as if with a will of their own. The film trades Caligari's painted sets for shadowed, realistic spaces, but keeps the same dread of identity dissolving from within. The premise has been remade twice, most notably as Mad Love (1935) with Peter Lorre, but Wiene's original remains the purest version of the body-horror idea. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Horror · Thriller · Silent