10 Hidden Meanings Behind Famous Horror Movies

10. The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari Is A Premonition For Nazi Germany

Robert Wiene’s silent horror The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari has been hailed by legendary film critic Roger Ebert as ‘the first true horror film’. Made way back in 1920, the movie not only played a massive part in shaping the look and feel of future horrors and film noirs but was also a pioneer of various cinematic techniques including the frame story and unreliable narrator. Furthermore, it’s a film that both captures the era’s artistic style, German Expressionism, and accurately illustrates the political and economic turmoil of post-World War I Germany.

In the years leading up to the making of the movie, after suffering defeat in World War I, Germany found itself under the rule of the newly established Weimar Republic. Facing territorial losses and massive war reparations imposed by outside forces, the German people grew increasingly humiliated and disillusioned with their new government and saw both the internal and external authorities that plunged their country into chaos as tyrannical and brutish.

Meanwhile in the fictional world of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a small German town is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious figure, the titular doctor, who starts committing a spate of murders via his hypnotised henchman, a somnambulist named Cesare. With Dr. Caligari standing in for the authorities controlling Germany and Cesare representing the German people, the movie captures the state of dread and oppression the populace felt the powers that be had thrusted upon them.

Given that just a few years after its release the Nazi Party’s rise to power would be in full swing, film theorists have too interpreted Dr. Caligari – a tyrannical madman committing atrocities via an obedient puppet – as a premonition of Germany under Hitler’s rule.

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