Tonight, we take things all the way back to the very beginning of cinema with a double shot of suspense from the superlative Silent Era. Before sound came to pictures, actors (who had been trained for the stage their whole lives) had to learn how to express themselves through facial expressions and body language without the luxury of having their bellowing voices carried across a theater.
Sound would be introduced to movies in 1927, and end the Silent Era, but film fanatics still cherish what few reels remain from those lost times. These two are as throwback as it gets, and it’s guaranteed that every single person you see in them is dead, and has been for a while. With the dark tone now properly set, it’s time for everyone to be silent because we’re heading back to the Roaring Twenties.
Nosferatu (1922)
The terror begins with the 1922 masterpiece by celebrated German director, F.W. Murnau (Faust, Sunrise). It tells the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but with changes to the location, and character names.
Despite the alterations, it was still enough to be considered plagiarism by the Stoker estate, and the courts ordered all copies to be destroyed. Luckily, a few copies survived the purge, and the film went on to become one of the ultimate classics, along with being the first official vampire film (take that, Stokers!). This is Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
The year is 1838, and young Thomas “Not Jonathan Harker” Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) is a real estate agent from the fictional town of Wisborg in the Northern seaside part of Germany. One day, he’s sent to Transylvania by his boss, Knock (Alexander Granach, but most certainly not Renfield), to close a big sale with the eccentric Count “Not Dracula” Orlok (Max Schreck).
It appears that the Count is very rich, and free with his money (until the lawsuit), but now he is finally ready to move out of the Carpathian boondocks. This deal was going to have him out of town for quite a while, and somebody wasn’t going to like this.
It doesn’t take long for Har-…HUTTER to placate his new wife whose name isn’t Mina, but is actually Ellen (Greta Schröder), and that was a relief because he usually couldn’t even give Ellen flowers without the sweet summer child losing her damn mind over it. He dumps Ellen off at a friend’s place and sets off for “The Land of Phantoms” without looking back.
When Hutter stops to rest for the night at an inn that’s close to his destination, he’s met with looks of suspicion that turn to fear when he tells the innkeeper where he’s going. They urge him to go back, and that certain death awaits, but he’s not going to buy some old wives tale from a bunch of Eastern European hicks (who know more about the area than he does).
He steals a book containing vampire lore from his room and takes off the next day. Hutter arrives at the decrepit castle that night, but not before hitching a ride from a really suspect-looking stagecoach driver, and meets the extremely suspect-looking Count Orlok.
His “servants” set out some dinner before retiring, and Hutter experiences the odd Transylvanian custom of sucking a person’s digits after they accidentally cut it with a knife. While the Count rests during the day, Hutter continues reading from the book he stole, and it becomes obvious that his hideous host is a vampire, but the two bite marks on Hutter’s neck should’ve been a dead giveaway.
To make matters worse, the bloody thumb-sucker just bought a place across the street from him back home. What plague has he helped unleash on Wisborg? Let’s just say that it’s not a good one.
For being 102 years old, it is still a pretty dark story, and it has a most fitting end for such. This was a copy of the Dracula story, but it also came out before pop culture shoved a stake through its heart.
From the urbane douchebags (no offense, Bela!) to the goofy cartoons, and the forgivable arithmetic on Sesame Street. Nobody since has made this character so creepy, and more of what a “bird of death” would look like.
As perfect as this film is in Silent Mode, it’s still a shame we can’t hear what Schreck sounded like as Count Orlok because (as we all know) everything always sounds scarier in German.
There are several versions of this movie with so many great scores (including one from the band Type O Negative) that it’s hard to point in one direction, but here’s the one on TUBI.
Here’s the trailer:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
The last horror movie of the night is also (arguably) the first horror movie ever made. This excludes three-minute shorts and anything else that burned in careless film studio vaults.
Coming from director Robert Wiene is one of the most influential films ever made (like the last feature), and it is a landmark in the German Expressionist movement. A tale of murder, madness, and straitjackets, I give you The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Francis (Friedrich Feher) and Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) are two best buds from some backwoods German town. Both men are competing for the same girl, Jane (Lil Dagover), and this friendly rivalry has found the three of them at a carnival.
Intrigued by this guy calling himself Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), they enter his tent to see his attraction – a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt) who has been asleep for 25 years and was now going to wake up under Dr. Caligari’s command.
After some people enter the tent and sit down, Dr. Caligari starts the show by having this somnambulist wake up, and stumble out of his box on stage. Apparently, he can predict the future when awake and chooses to spend his life sleeping in the cabinet.
When Alan asks the pale, gaunt weirdo how long he has to live, Alan gets the news that he will die before dawn tomorrow. This freaks out the three-piece, and they leave the carnival, but then Alan is found dead the next morning. Did the sleepy Goth guy murder him? Was his prediction just the luckiest guess in the world?? Or is everyone a little mad around here???
The look of this film is amazing and its world is a bizarre landscape of sharp angles with tilted walls and windows, staircases spiraling up in crazy directions, and grass that looks like knives. In a time when filmmakers couldn’t verbally say how crazy a person was, they had to be creative.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a tapestry of delirium, and how it shapes the world through the eyes of the insane. This movie is over in the Crackle ward, but bring your own straitjacket! Here’s the trailer:
