Caligari's villain was modelled on a real army psychiatrist
Carl Mayer faked madness to dodge service in the First World War and was grilled by a military psychiatrist. That man became the model for Dr. Caligari, the sinister hypnotist of a 1920 silent film whose painted, leaning sets helped invent the look of horror cinema and later film noir.
Robert Wiene directed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from a script by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, two penniless pacifists introduced in June 1918 by the actor Ernst Deutsch. Janowitz had served as an officer and came home bitter about the military. The pair wrote 141 scenes in about six weeks over the winter of 1918 to 1919, with no film-industry experience between them. A Berlin sideshow called Man or Machine, where a hypnotised performer showed feats of strength, sparked the premise, and Janowitz borrowed the name Holstenwall for his fictional town from a Hamburg street where he believed he had once witnessed a crime.
Werner Krauss plays Caligari, a fairground showman whose sleepwalker Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt, carries out killings at his command. The designers Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig pushed for a graphic rather than naturalistic look, so buildings tilt, streets spiral and light and shadow are painted straight onto the sets. A frame story ends with a twist: the narrator Franzis turns out to be an asylum patient, and the man he calls Caligari is the kindly director. Janowitz said this device was imposed on the writers against their wishes.
Critics have long read the film as a parable of German obedience, with Caligari standing for the wartime government and Cesare for the conditioned soldier. The origins of that reading are shakier than they look. Warm said Mayer had no political aim, and the historian David Robinson points out that Janowitz only spoke of anti-authority intentions decades later, perhaps absorbing what interpreters had said. Janowitz's claim that the name came from an unknown letter by Stendhal also has no supporting record.
Accounts of its first reception differ, but the film was screened abroad as import limits eased after the war. It placed 12th on the Brussels 12 list at the 1958 World Expo, Roger Ebert suggested it may be the earliest genuine horror movie, and Danny Peary named it cinema's first cult movie.
Source: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
