Eureka! … Since 1981

Eureka! Classics | Robert Wiene’s classic German horror film

In the little village of Holstenwall on the Dutch border, fairground hypnotist Dr Caligari (Werner Krauss) puts on show a somnambulist called Cesare (Conrad Veidt) who has been asleep for twenty-three years. At night, dressed in a black body-stocking and with a ghostly white face, he slithers through the town murdering people on the doctor’s orders. A student (Friedrich Feher) has his suspicions about Caligari after a friend is found dead and it transpires that the doctor is the director of a lunatic asylum. The story also has a sting in the tail added by the producer!

This classic German horror film was inspired by the unsolved murder of a girl during a carnival. Fritz Lang was approached to direct but was too busy. The task was undertaken by Robert Wiene who hired Expressionistic designers Hermann Warm, Walter Roehrig and Walter Reimann, all affiliated to the magazine Sturm, to design the innovative painted sets that included distorted perspectives, twisted shapes and sharp angles. The idea was to try and expand the cinema beyond its obsession with re-creating reality.

The finished film originally released with an elaborate green, brown and cold blue tints thrust German cinema to world prominence and had a tremendous influence on cinematic art worldwide and has a quality that still impresses today. Wiene tried to repeat his success in later years, but failed miserably.

Directed by Robert Wiene
Produced by Erich Pommer
From the book by Carl Meyer and Hans Janowitz

Cast: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Friedrich Feher, Lil Dagover and Hans von Twardowski