Widely considered to be one of the most influential horror movies of the silent era, Robert Weine's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is great example of a film from the German Expressionism art movement. It fuses stylised sets combined with eccentric performances to achieve a uniquely unsettling atmosphere, as effective today as it was when it was released in 1920. For a film so old there are a number of genuinely chilling sequences, not least the sight of the creepy sleep-walking puppet murderer Cesare (Conrad Veidt), lumbering out of his coffin as he goes about his proxy killings for the titular Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss). As with F. W. Murnau's silent masterpiece Nosferatu, the angular sets and deliberately unnatural movements of the actors create a mood of unreality a sense of dislocation from the familiar which enhanced the ambiguity of the flashback sequences. We're no longer in the real world we're inside the fractured mind of a lunatic, the darkest aspect embodied in the tall, gaunt form of Cesare as he looms menacingly over his sleeping prey. Cesare may be the one carrying out these atrocious acts, but it is Dr. Caligari himself who is the crazy architect behind them all. Or is he? As the audience travels back and forth between the psychiatric hospital and the events as we are told them, the line between fantasy and reality becomes increasingly blurred.
