The film opens in the German town of Holstenwall, seen in a drawing as houses like shrieks climbing a steep hill. After a prologue, a story is told: A sideshow operator named Caligari (Werner Krauss) arrives at the fair to exhibit the Somnambulist, a man he claims has been sleeping since his birth 23 years ago. This figure, named Cesare (Conrad Veidt), sleeps in a coffin and is hand-fed by the crazed-looking doctor, who claims he can answer any question.
The hero, Francis (Frederich Feher), visits the show with his friend Alan (Hans Heinz von Twardowski), who boldly asks, "When will I die?" The reply is chilling: "At first dawn!" At dawn Alan is dead. Suspicion falls on Cesare. Francis keeps watch all night through a window as Caligari sleeps next to the closed coffin. But the next morning, his fiancee, Jane (Lil Dagover), has been abducted. Does that clear the doctor and the Somnambulist from suspicion?
In itself, this is not a startling plot. The film's design transforms it into something very weird, especially as Cesare is seen carrying the unconscious Jane and is pursued by a mob. The chase carries them through streets of stark lights and shadows and up a zigzagging mountain trail. Caligari, meanwhile, is followed by Francis as he returns to where he apparently lives -- the insane asylum, where he is the ... director! Evidence is discovered by Francis and the local police that Caligari, influenced by an occult medieval manuscript, yearned to find a somnambulist and place him under a hypnotic spell, subjecting him to his will.
A case can be made that "Caligari" was the first true horror film. There had been earlier ghost stories and the eerie serial "Fantomas" made in 1913-14, but their characters were inhabiting a recognizable world. "Caligari" creates a mindscape, a subjective psychological fantasy. In this world, unspeakable horror becomes possible.
"Caligari" is said to be the first example in cinema of German Expressionism, a visual style in which not only the characters but the world itself is out of joint. I don't know of another film that used its extreme distortions and discordant angles, but its over-all attitude certainly cleared the way for "The Golem," "Nosferatu," "Metropolis" and "M." In one of the best-known books ever written about film, From Caligari to Hitler, the art historian Siegfried Kracauer argued that the rise of Nazism was foretold by the preceding years of German films, which reflected a world at wrong angles and lost values. In this reading, Caligari was Hitler and the German people were sleepwalkers under his spell.
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