Evil in Mind: German Expressionism & Horror

By Kelsey Ronan

Germany, 1916: a dark and stormy night. In the tumult of the First World War, amid food shortages and mass casualties, cinema screens went black. As a response to pervasive propaganda depicting the barbaric Hun, Germany banned foreign films. The sudden demand for domestic cinema led to a consolidation of film companies and the largest film studio in the world: the Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). Film production surged. So too did moviegoing. By the late 1930s, Germany boasted more movie theaters than any other country in Europe. 

On the UFA lots, filmmakers worked in an uncertain world traumatized by war and ill at ease with authority. Between the end of WWI and the rise of the Third Reich, Germany was rocked by inflation, high unemployment, reparations, and violent tensions between socialists and right-wing extremists espousing anti-semitism and hate speech. 

German Expressionism was the cinematic response to this turmoil. The movement was defined by its visual signature: highly stylized, distorted sets with painted shadows, stark contrasts, and jagged lines. Its storylines were rife with dread and anxiety. Man is reduced to powerless automaton. Madness disrupts the boundary between reality and nightmare. Evil lurks in bureaucracy. In their eerie style and exploration of menace in the everyday world, German Expressionist movies shot on the lots at UFA forever influenced horror.

THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (Robert Wiene, 1920, Germany)

The quintessential work of German Expressionism and a landmark achievement in film is Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film unfolds as a frame narrative: in what appears to be a park, Franzis recounts a tale of madness and manipulation. In case we weren’t reading the intertitles, his fiancee alerts us that something ain’t right: the now-archetypal spooky lady, she wanders by in a white nightgown, her long dark hair and unblinking eyes, seemingly in a trance. 

In Franzis’ story, Dr. Caligari comes to a town and applies for his permit to present his spectacle at the village fair. The village itself is a tumble of houses with the jagged edges of jack-o’-lantern teeth, awash in sickly yellow interiors and cold blue nights. The surly town clerk angling over his four foot stool establishes that this is not an evil that creeps into your dreams Freddy Kreuger-style or sets your head spinning and projectile vomiting; this is an evil with a bureaucratic stamp.  Later, at the fair, after Caligari has summoned Cesare the somnambulist from his coffin-like cabinet and the horrors begin, the angry villagers don’t take up their pitchforks; the police secure authorization to investigate. 

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari exemplifies German Expressionism with its claustrophobic interiors, warped lampposts, and stark shadows, but it also, according to Roger Ebert, may be the world’s first horror film. While the early years of cinema captured plenty of ghosts and spookiness, Robert Wiene’s film, Ebert wrote, “creates a mindscape, a subjective psychological fantasy. In this world, unspeakable horror becomes possible.” 

Wiene, a Jew, would later flee Germany after the Nazi rise to power and continue making films in Paris until his death in 1938. Though it’s unknown if he was referencing Cesare, the thin somnambulist in the black bodysuit, ultimate boogeyman Hitler often repeated in his speeches, “I follow my course with the precision and security of a sleepwalker.”

FRANKENSTEIN (J. Searle Dawley 1910, USA) & FRANKENSTEIN (James Whale, 1931, USA)

From its graveyard opening—crosses askew, shadows slanting across tombstones—the influence of German Expressionism on James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein is unmistakable. In the film, based on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Dr. Henry Frankenstein and his assistant, Edgar, rob graves and steal brains. The scene is now deeply ingrained in our cultural consciousness: Dr. Frankenstein’s frenzied shout “It’s alive!” as the monster, with bolts in his neck, lumbering gait, and outstretched arms, rises to life– or some nightmarish approximation of life– while thunder and lightning crash overhead. 

This was not, however, the monster’s big screen debut. In 1910, Frankenstein and his monster made their film debut in a ten-minute one-reeler produced by Edison studios and directed by J. Searle Dawley. The film begins, bizarrely, with young Frankenstein leaving for med school, then flashes forward two years later to an excited doctor writing to the woman he hopes will be so impressed that he’s about to create life that she’ll marry him. Lest this context of youth and young love prime you to sympathize, the intertitle warns, INSTEAD OF A PERFECT HUMAN BEING THE EVIL IN FRANKENSTEIN’S MIND CREATES A MONSTER. Without a haunted castle and a thunderstorm, Dawley’s monster comes together like a vat of stew. From the steaming cauldron a vaguely human form emerges, Muppetishly waving one arm, then two. The monster fully formed looks like the offspring of Beetlejuice and Pennywise: a tall figure with wild, scraggly hair, clown feet, and a high forehead. F.W. Murnau may have stored away the image of the creature’s long fingers for Nosferatu.

It was Boris Karloff’s 1931 portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster that gave us the image of the green-skinned, square-headed monster– one that has since become the ubiquitous and kid-friendly stuff of Halloween decorations and funny dog costumes. But, produced before the Hays Code sanitized Hollywood, Frankenstein shocked its audiences. The film was cut and censored for blasphemy (“Now I know what it feels like to be God!” Dr. Frankenstein exclaims) and violence. It was banned outright in several countries. Now Frankenstein’s legacy is undeniable; sequels, parodies, and homages abound: Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Frankenstein Meets the Mummy, I could go on– homages like Spirit of the Beehive, and spoofs from Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Gene Wilder’s Young Frankenstein, to The Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episode where Mr. Burns makes a Homeresque monster. A new version by Guillermo del Toro is set to release October 17.  

FRANKENWEENIE (Tim Burton, 2012, USA)

Recently my cat died of acute liver failure and I thought a lot about that George Carlin line: “Every pet is a tiny tragedy waiting to happen.” If you are not comforted by the thought of reuniting with your pet someday at the rainbow bridge, you, like Victor Frankenstein, the sensitive, artistic tween at the center of Tim Burton’s stop-motion Frankenweenie, might desperately attempt to play god. In the film’s first minutes, very good boy Sparky is hit by a car. Victor, grief-stricken, gets an idea from his substitute science teacher’s impromptu lecture on electricity and the nervous system (offered as an explanation of how their teacher was struck by lightning, which none of the students seem particularly sad about).

As well as a retelling of Frankenstein, the movie is a homage to classic horror. Burton’s visual style mixes German Expressionism with 1950s suburban kitsch. Ranch houses are draped in shadows; attic dormers jut at impossible angles; spindly-legged characters peer out with the heavily shadowed eyes of silent film stars. There are plenty of tongue in cheek references for horror movie buffs—the lightning bolt through a poodle’s bouffant, a nod to Nosferatu when a gaggle of kids creep up a staircase, sea monkeys hefting themselves Creature from the Black Lagoon style—but the emotional heft of the film remains earnest. Rest in peace, Little Wolf. 

SUSPIRIA (Dario Argento, 1977, Italy)

It’s a dark and stormy night: American ballerina Suzy Bannion lands in Germany as a storm lashes the unfamiliar country. Suzy taxis from the airport to the Baroque ballet academy where she’ll be studying, but a voice on the other side of the door denies her entry. Back in the taxi, drenched and unsure where to go, Suzy sees a young woman appear in the door. “Secret,” the woman says. “Iris.” Then the woman runs out into the rain, flashing through the trees, and to her doom. So begins Dario Argento’s psychedelic horror film about the world’s scariest dance classes.

Suspiria’s aesthetic is seemingly far from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Frankenstein (Frankenweenie, too): the visual palette of the ballet academy isn’t stark black and white but garish primary color. The ballet academy isn’t made of jagged lines and shadows, but is a Baroque gingerbread house inhabited by pretty young women in flouncy skirts and high heels. The walls are blues and reds so vibrant they seem to pulse. The soundtrack (by Italian prog-rock band Goblin) is one of music box tinkling layered with a la la la of breathy vocals. But Suspiria is anchored in Expressionism’s dreamscape of vulnerability and madness, of evil lurking in seemingly venerable institutions and the difficulty to distinguish between nightmare and reality. Should Suzy trust the doctor who insists she drink a glass of syrupy-thick red wine each night? Is that some malevolent force wheezing behind the curtain or does one of the dancers have sleep apnea? Why are the doorknobs so high? What’s behind the closed doors down that bright red hallway?

Though the film received mixed reviews upon its release, it’s since been hailed as a masterpiece. Variety, in its list of the 100 best horror movies of all time, described it, “all style, all psychotic-Italian-horror-movie frosting: the sets that still dazzle with their Satan-gone-Liberace decor, the 14-note evil-music-box theme by Goblin that can play in your head for decades.” 

Created in a war-torn Germany struggling through trauma and upheaval, German Expressionism shows us that the ultimate horror is the nightmare we can’t wake from. From the institutional horrors of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to the mad doctor playing god in Frankenstein (and the grief-stricken middle schooler playing god in Frankenweenie), its jagged, claustrophobic, and shadowed visual signature reflect our anxieties and fears. The scary movies we love continue to pay homage to Expressionism’s tilted streets and oppressive shadows. They remind us that no one—not doctors, dance teachers, or civil servants at town hall—can truly be trusted.