Synopsis
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, 1920) is Robert Wiene's silent horror film, free to watch online on iFILM. It is where cinema first learned to frighten.
Francis looks back on a nightmare he shared with his friend Alan and his fiancee Jane. A traveling fair brings Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) to their town, along with Cesare, a sleepwalker who has spent years in an upright box. On command he wakes, and he predicts that Alan will be dead by dawn. Bodies start turning up. Conrad Veidt makes Cesare a gaunt figure in black tights who became a template for every screen monster that followed.
What seals its legend is the look. German Expressionist painters built the sets by hand: crooked streets, jagged rooftops, shadows brushed straight onto the canvas, walls that lean like a fever dream. Then the ending pulls the floor out from under everything you watched. Anyone tracing the roots of horror and art cinema has to start here. Stream The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) online on iFILM.
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