Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

 The “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was very interesting for our first screening of movies. The first thing that really caught my eye was how crazy the sets looked. In the movie everything was disproportionate and asymmetrical from the shapes of the windows, the slantedness of the buildings, the windy streets, etc. It was like I was watching a live action cartoon or an art piece turned into a movie. I feel like it gave the movie an uneasy and nightmarish quality to it which was good since it is supposed to be a horror movie and was also a nightmare in a way. I could tell that this style inspired movie directors like Tim Burton. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari reminded me of many movies of his such as “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, “Edward Scissorhands” and “Beetlejuice”. This also appears to be one of the first movies that uses an unreliable narrator. I think this concept always makes a movie a lot more interesting because you don't know if all or some of the events that occurred were real or fake. I believe that this movie indirectly inspired one of my favorite films “American Psycho” which is followed through the eyes of a serial killer named Patrick Bateman but by the end of the movie you start to second guess everything that occurred and it really makes me think long and hard about the movie in my bed at night. Cesare was a very interesting part of the movie since he was apparently a somnambulist or a sleepwalker and was being controlled by Caligari. When I first saw Cesare pop out of his cabinet standing tall above everyone else I immediately thought that he might of been the inspiration for Frankenstein. They are both monstrous figures, they are both controlled by some higher authority and they both have very eerie and stiff movements.