Where Horror Film Began: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

in Film | December 9th, 2010 2 Comments

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In ear­ly 1920, Robert Wiene pre­miered in Berlin his silent film The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari. Ever since, crit­ics have lav­ished praise upon Cali­gari, call­ing it a mod­el of Ger­man expres­sion­ist film, the great­est hor­ror film of ear­ly cin­e­ma, and an impor­tant influ­ence on direc­tors lat­er work­ing in the film noir tra­di­tion. And, what’s more (spoil­er alert), Wiene’s film intro­duced the ‘twist end­ing’ to cin­e­ma. Today, you can watch this ground­break­ing film in its entire­ty above, down­load it from the Inter­net Archive, or find it per­ma­nent­ly list­ed in our ever-grow­ing col­lec­tion of Free Movies. Thanks to Melis­sa for the good find…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franken­stein Hits the Sil­ver Screen (1910)

How The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari Invent­ed Psy­cho­log­i­cal Hor­ror Film & Brought Expres­sion­ism to the Screen (1920)

From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Look at How Cin­e­ma Laid the Foun­da­tion for Tyran­ny in Weimar Ger­many


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Comments (2)
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  • Leisureguy says:
    December 9, 2010 at 7:52 am

    I think spoil­er pro­to­col is well known and I’m sur­prised by your vio­lat­ing it. The idea is to state that a spoil­er is com­ing up so that the read­er can avoid the spoil­er. I’m not sure what your pur­pose is to print a spoil­er and sub­se­quent­ly note that it is a spoil­er. Is this to ensure that the read­er will remem­ber the spoil­er and thus do its bit to ruin the expe­ri­ence? You per­haps think that spoil­ing things is this way is amus­ing, but I for one detest it. In this case it was total­ly unnecessary—simply a kind of van­dal­ism. I hope that you are sin­cere­ly ashamed.

    Reply
  • Mike says:
    December 9, 2010 at 8:25 am

    A per­son notes that a 90-year-old film has a “twist ending”–but does­n’t say what the twist is–and that’s viewed as an act of van­dal­ism? Now that’s twist­ed!

    Reply

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