Silent movies - The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

After two rather long movies I needed something a bit shorter for my silent movie "project" this time.
We had a fairy tale and an adventure movie, both with happy endings. How about trying something very different? I brought you a horror movie today, actually what has been called the first true horror movie - "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" from 1920 which you can watch on YouTube here.
I'm not a big fan of horror movies because I'm a coward. I get nightmares which makes den Dekan jumpy and Gundel shake her head at me. So if I watch one, I don't do it before going to sleep. Will Dr. Caligari follow me in my sleep, though? As in is he still scary today?

Let's start with the plot as usual.
Two men are sitting in a garden. A lady in white is walking by, looking as if in trance. The younger man says "That is my fiancée." and begins telling a story.

We are in the German town of Holstenwall and there's a fair. A young man, Alan, persuades his friend Franzis (the narrator) to go there with him.
Next you see an older gentleman going to the town clerk, who is really rude to him, to ask for a permit to present his showpiece at the fair - a somnambulist. His card says Dr. Caligari.
That night, the town clerk is murdered.
At the fair, Dr. Caligari introduces Cesare, the somnambulist who, according to him, has been sleeping day and night in a cabinet reminding of a casket for 23 years. He orders him to wake up and tells the audience - among them Alan and Franzis - to ask Cesare a question as he "knows the past and sees the future".

Despite Franzis trying to hold him back, Alan goes to the stage and asks how long he will be living. Cesare tells him he has until the break of dawn.
After leaving the fair, Alan is understandably distressed, even more so when they see a poster about the murder. Then they meet Jane in the street, a young lady they are both in love with. They agree to let her choose and remain friends no matter what.
Unfortunately, Alan is brutally stabbed that night. Franzis goes to the police and has an investigation started. Afterwards he goes to Jane to give her the terrible news, then he meets up with Jane's father to tell him he suspects Cesare to be the murderer.
Meanwhile, a criminal tries to kill a woman in the same way, but when he's caught, he claims he just wanted to divert the blame and has nothing to do with the first two murders.
Jane who doesn't know that Franzis and her father are at the police starts worrying and goes to the fairground. She asks Caligari if he has seen them and he pulls her into the tent and shows her Cesare.
After Alan's funeral, Franzis goes to Caligari's wagon and finds him and Cesare both sleeping.
At that moment, however, Cesare is walking through town (my favorite scene because of the way he seems to dance along the wall).

He enters Jane's room and tries to kill her, but he can't get himself to do it. Instead he abducts her.

He's followed by a group of men and drops Jane, escaping barely himself and falling over dead. Or is he?
Franzis can't believe what has happened because he has stayed in front of the wagon all night, but when they take a closer look at the cabinet, they find that's there's just a doll in there looking like Cesare.

Caligari escapes into the mental asylum. Franzis follows him and discovers that he really is the asylum's director. Franzis manages to convince several doctors to go through Caligari's office while he's sleeping, and they find a book about somnambulism with a story called "The cabinet of Dr. Caligari" about a mystic travelling fairs with a somnambulist called Cesare whom he hypnotized to make him commit crimes.
When a somnambulist is admitted to the asylum, the director gets obsessed with the idea of becoming Caligari himself and finding out if such a thing is really possible.
After the doctors have read this, Cesare is brought to the director who has a breakdown when he sees him. He's put in a straitjacket "and from that day on, the madman never again left his cell".

The movie now goes back to the garden, you see the Franzis and the other man get up and enter the hall of the asylum where you see different people.
Jane is there, sitting on what looks a throne, declining Franzis' request to marry him. Cesare is there, awake, smiling and holding flowers.
When the director comes into the hall, looking completely normal compared to what he looked like in the story, Franzis has an outburst of rage claiming that not he is insane, but the director who is Caligari. Franzis is put in a straitjacket and the director says he now understands the source of his insanity and knows a way to cure him.
What is real? What isn't?

From what I read there are different theories about different components of the film - the plot, the deeper meaning, the frame story, the set, the lighting.
Some interpretations were developed years later, people told different versions of stories, maybe adapted memories to what seemed to fit.
There are enough sources out there where you can read about all of that and I will add some at the end of the post, but I'm neither a film historian nor critic, and while I read through the articles, I don't feel it would make sense for me to try and add my two cents about theories of authority, schizophrenia, or the way Germans felt after the First World War.

Instead I will just tell how I saw and liked the movie.
What obviously catches your eye first is the set. Almost from the start, when you see the painting of the town as a background, you know that nothing in this film is going to be straight or ordinary. Windows, walls, and streets are crooked and have strange angles, stools are ridiculously high (and look very uncomfortable), shadows are painted on, everything seems to be part of a bizarre and twisted dream in which the characters move.
Even the intertitles are artistic with their stylized letters and geometric shapes and scribbles.
The costumes are a strange mix of time periods, some seem abstract (I'm especially fascinated by the policeman's hat).
All of that adds to the expressionist feeling of the film.

Even if you expect the characters to provide the horror, you may get surprised. This is no movie that makes you jump in your seat, there's no obvious gore, hardly any fights - this is a movie that creeps up on you, dark and grotesque.
It lives through the characters, Franzis who is so determined to solve this puzzle, Jane who mostly seems to float through the movie, Caligari whose movements are emphasized by his strange walk, but also the expression on his face, and of course Cesare although he hardly seems human through most of the film. I love the scene he enters Jane's room and you can imagine many vampires to be based on this scene.

The linked version comes with a score that was commissioned by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation and the TV channels ZDF and ARTE and composed by students of the Freiburg University of Music.
It's - different. I admit I'm not particularly adventurous in regards to contemporary music - which aims "to bring historical film events into the present" - and at first I had to turn down the volume because again (like in "The Lost World") it was a bit overwhelming. After a while, however, I had got used to it, I guess, or maybe the movie captured me so much that it faded into the background.

Now back to my question - does Caligari manage to scare me?
Could be that scare isn't the right word. It made me feel uneasy and it felt creepy and will stay with me for a while. Maybe I will be trying to make up my mind about the ending or what meaning I see in the movie or maybe I will just remember the overall feeling of it.
I honestly can't say at the moment, but I know I recommend watching it at least once if only for the influence it had on films coming after it.

Sources:
1. Sean Fallon: Away From The Hype: The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari. On: Film Inquiry, June 16, 2023
2. Fritzi Kramer: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). A silent film review. On: Movies Silently, May 12, 2013
3. Alex Barrett: 100 years of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: why we're still living in its shadows. On: British Film Institute. Feature, February 25, 2020
4. Robert Horton: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. An expressionist masterpiece. On: Goethe-Institut USA
5. Roger Ebert: A world slanted at sharp angles. On: RogerEbert.com, Reviews, June 3, 2009
6. Chris Vognar: Lasting Fright: The Staying Power of the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. On: RogerEbert.com, Features, November 5, 2020