February 26

“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari & the Birth of Horror”

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On February 26, 1920, at the Marmorhaus theatre in Berlin, the lights went down, a crooked world appeared on the screen, and cinema was never quite the same again. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari had arrived—and with it, the first true horror film, the first cult film, and one of the most sustained acts of occult imagination in the history of the moving image.

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The producer, Erich Pommer, was so nervous on his way to the premiere that he reportedly turned to his companions and announced: "It will be a horrible failure for all of us."

He was wrong. Women in the audience screamed when the somnambulist Cesare first opened his eyes. Some fainted during the abduction scene. The film ran for four weeks—an extraordinary run for the era—then returned two weeks later by popular demand. Within months it had screened in Paris, London, New York, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Buenos Aires. Within a year it had generated a critical vocabulary—"caligarism"—to describe an entirely new mode of cinematic horror. Within a decade it had seeded Nosferatu, Metropolis, Frankenstein, and the whole dark flowering of horror and film noir that followed.

All of this from a film that almost didn't get made—and was nearly destroyed by the very people who created it.

The Two Pacifists and the War

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was written in the winter of 1918–19 by two men who had spent the preceding years being comprehensively traumatized by the German military machine. Hans Janowitz had served as an officer in the war and come home embittered, carrying with him a specific and festering memory: a night in 1913 near an amusement park on Hamburg's Reeperbahn, where he believed he had witnessed a murder. A woman disappeared into the bushes. A respectable-looking man emerged moments later. The next day, Janowitz read that the girl had been killed. The fair, the darkness, the respectable face concealing something monstrous—all of it went into the screenplay.

Carl Mayer had taken a different route through the war: he had feigned madness to avoid military service, which subjected him to a series of intense examinations by a military psychiatrist. The psychiatrist—cold, authoritative, convinced of his own rational power over the minds of others became the model for Dr. Caligari. The man who compels you to do things against your will while dressed in the robes of legitimate authority. The doctor who is himself the most dangerous madman in the room.

The two men met in June 1918, introduced by the actor Ernst Deutsch, and wrote their script together over six weeks. Both were penniless. Neither had any connection to the film industry. They walked into the offices of the Decla-Film studio in April 1919, refused to leave the script with the producer, and instead had Mayer read it aloud on the spot. The producer was so transfixed he refused to let them leave until a contract was signed. He paid 3,500 marks for material he believed he could film cheaply. "They saw an experiment," he later said. "I saw a relatively cheap film."

The Sets That Howled

The visual style of Caligari was not in the original screenplay. Set designer Hermann Warm, brought in to prepare proposals for the production, read the script through the night with his colleagues Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig—both painters associated with the Berlin avant-garde magazine Der Sturm—and by morning they had their answer. The sets would not represent reality. They would represent the distortion of reality by a deranged mind. Every line would lean. Every shadow would be painted directly onto the canvas rather than cast by light. Every building would suggest the possibility of collapse or explosion. Every street would spiral toward an invisible vanishing point.

"Films must be drawings brought to life," Warm said. The producer agreed—for commercial reasons, since painted canvas was cheaper than constructed sets—and the artists were given free rein to make everything as "crazy" and "eccentrically" as possible.

What they produced was unlike anything that had appeared on a screen before. Roger Ebert would later describe it as "a jagged landscape of sharp angles and tilted walls and windows, staircases climbing crazy diagonals, trees with spiky leaves, grass that looks like knives." The film critic Lotte Eisner, writing in The Haunted Screen, observed that objects in the film seem to vibrate with an "extraordinary spirituality"—as if the material world had become saturated with the anxieties of the minds inhabiting it. Rudolf Kurtz, in Expressionismus und Film, went further: "the dynamic force of objects howls their desire to be created."

Shadows and streaks of light were painted onto the sets so that the camera had no choice but to see the world as the madman sees it. There was no access, as film historian Stephen Brockmann would later observe, to any natural world beyond the realm of the tortured human psyche. The entire film was shot in a studio without a single exterior location—a decision that was partly practical and entirely perfect.

Caligari’s Occult Logic

For readers of Modern Occultist, the plot of Caligari operates on a register that purely secular criticism tends to undervalue. A hypnotist compels a somnambulist to commit murders on his behalf. The somnambulist—Cesare, played by Conrad Veidt in one of the most extraordinary performances in the history of silent film—has no will of his own. He sleeps in a coffin-like cabinet and wakes only on Caligari's command. He predicts the deaths of those who question him. He kills without passion or remorse, because he is not truly present in the act: his body moves through the world while his mind is elsewhere, or nowhere.

This is the oldest occult fear made cinematic: the animated body without a soul, the will transferred from one being to another through hidden means, the master who operates through an instrument that appears human but is not. Cesare is the golem, the zombie, the magician's servitor—rendered in Expressionist paint and the extraordinary physical gifts of Conrad Veidt, who moved along the walls of those crooked sets, in Barlow's memorable description, "as if the wall had 'exuded' him... more a part of a material world of objects than a human one."

Caligari himself is drawn from the portrait of Schopenhauer—top hat, cape, ivory-handled walking stick—but his obsession has a specific and deeply strange origin. Buried in the asylum director's private records, Franzis discovers the story of an eighteenth-century mystic also named Caligari, who used a somnambulist named Cesare to commit murders in northern Italian towns. The present Caligari has spent years studying this earlier figure, and at some point the study became something else: "I must become Caligari!" The scream of a man who has crossed the line from understanding a dark thing to embodying it. It is one of the most compressed and unsettling depictions of occult obsession ever committed to film.

The Shadow It Cast

The film's influence moved through cinema like an underground river. F.W. Murnau absorbed its use of shadow and psychological space into Nosferatu two years later. Fritz Lang took its claustrophobic studio world and its themes of compulsion and hidden authority into Metropolis and M. When German directors fled the Nazis in the 1930s—many of them trained in the visual tradition Caligari had established—they carried it to Hollywood, where it surfaced in the darkness of film noir: the crooked sets became crooked cities, the somnambulist became the femme fatale's unwitting instrument, the hypnotist became the corrupt official or the mob boss or the psychiatrist who turns out to be the most dangerous figure in the room.

The music chosen for Caligari's American premiere in 1921 was compiled by conductor Ernö Rapée, who drew on Schoenberg, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Prokofiev—the same composers whose work would provide atmosphere for the great occult films of later decades. The Capitol Theatre's manager gave Rapée his brief in a single sentence: the music had, he said, "to be made eligible for citizenship in a nightmare country."

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The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Directed by Robert Wiene. Written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. Set design by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann, and Walter Röhrig. Starring Werner Krauss as Dr. Caligari and Conrad Veidt as Cesare. World premiere: February 26, 1920, Marmorhaus Theatre, Berlin.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

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