The German Expressionist Horror Canon

Between roughly 1919 and 1933, a defeated country with a collapsing currency and a protected film industry produced the visual vocabulary that horror cinema still speaks. Every low-angle shot of a monster, every shadow thrown ahead of a villain up a staircase, every set built at a deliberate angle to make the audience uneasy before a line has been spoken — all of it was worked out in Berlin and Babelsberg by people who had no intention of founding a genre.

The economics matter. During the First World War, Germany banned foreign films; the domestic industry grew fat behind the wall, and in 1917 the state consolidated much of it into UFA, which by 1921 controlled Europe’s largest studio complex at Babelsberg. Then the mark collapsed. Hyperinflation made German labour and German sets absurdly cheap in dollar terms while making imports impossible, so UFA could afford enormous constructed worlds and could not afford to shoot outdoors on location. That constraint is the mother of the whole style: when everything must be built, everything can be wrong. The plaster gets painted with its own shadows. The staircase leans.

I have made the broader case for the movement’s influence in the German Expressionist shadow over horror and for the silent era’s continuing power in why silent horror still frightens. This is the watchlist those arguments point at — ten films, roughly chronological, each with a reason to sit here and a way to see it.

The founding text

The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920). Robert Wiene’s film is the movement’s Year Zero and remains its most extreme statement. The sets, designed by Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig, are painted flats: shadows are brushstrokes, windows are rhomboids, the ground refuses to be level. Warm’s often-quoted principle — that film images must become graphic art — is the entire programme in eight words. A fairground hypnotist exhibits a somnambulist (Conrad Veidt, in the performance that invented an entire physical vocabulary for the monster) who may be committing murders in the town. The frame narrative was reportedly added over the objections of writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, and the argument about whether it defangs the film or completes it has run for a hundred years without resolution. Restored beautifully in 2014 from the camera negative; the Eureka and Kino discs are both excellent. Start here, and see the full account of the set.

The Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). Paul Wegener’s third pass at the material — the first two are lost — and the one that survives is the origin story: a rabbi in sixteenth-century Prague animates a clay man to protect the Jewish quarter, and the clay man gets ideas. Hans Poelzig, a serious architect, designed the ghetto as a warren of organic, drooping, cave-like buildings that look grown instead of built. Watch it for Wegener’s own performance as the Golem, which is heavy and slow and sad, and which James Whale’s crew had plainly studied before Frankenstein (1931). The sequence with the little girl at the end travelled directly into Whale’s film. More here.

Destiny (Der müde Tod) (1921). Fritz Lang’s portmanteau — a woman bargains with Death for her lover’s life across three historical tales — is the least-watched film on this list and the most quietly influential. Douglas Fairbanks bought the American rights largely to steal its effects for The Thief of Bagdad, and Hitchcock said watching it made him want to make films. Lang’s Death is a tired civil servant, weary of the work, which is a characterisation nobody had attempted.

The vampire and the sleepwalker’s descendants

Nosferatu (1922). F.W. Murnau’s unlicensed Dracula, made without Florence Stoker’s permission, prosecuted for it, and ordered destroyed — a court judgment that failed only because prints had already escaped. Max Schreck’s Orlok is a rat-featured plague carrier rather than a seducer, and the film’s greatest asset is Murnau’s willingness to shoot outdoors, which drags the supernatural into real Slovakian landscapes and real Baltic light. The shadow-on-the-staircase shot is here, and so is the film’s uncomfortable imagery of contagion arriving from the east. The full story.

Waxworks (1924). Paul Leni’s anthology puts a poet in a fairground waxworks writing stories about three exhibits: Harun al-Rashid (Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt) and Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss). The first two segments are comedy and costume melodrama. The Ripper episode, four minutes long and shot with superimposed dissolves that make the fairground bleed through the chase, is one of the purest nightmares of the silent era. Leni went to Hollywood on the strength of it and made The Cat and the Canary (1927), which is how the style entered the American old dark house.

Warning Shadows (Schatten) (1923). Arthur Robison’s film has almost no intertitles and needs none. A travelling shadow-player arrives at a dinner party, hypnotises the guests, and shows them the murder their jealousies are heading towards. It is a complete essay on the movement’s central device — the shadow as the true self — executed as a chamber piece.

The masters at full budget

Faust (1926). Murnau’s last German film, and the most expensive thing UFA had attempted. Its opening — Mephisto’s wings unfurling over a plague town, the shadow spreading across the miniature landscape like ink in water — is arguably the single most beautiful image in German silent cinema. Murnau shot it with Carl Hoffmann using smoke, scale models and multiple exposures in camera, because there was no other way. Emil Jannings plays Mephisto broadly and wonderfully.

Metropolis (1927). Lang’s city film bankrupted UFA, was butchered on release, and spent eighty years incomplete until a near-full print turned up in Buenos Aires in 2008. It sits in a horror canon on the strength of one sequence: Rotwang’s laboratory, the rings of light rising around Brigitte Helm, the machine-woman opening her eyes. That set piece is the direct ancestor of every mad-science scene in the Universal cycle, and Kenneth Strickfaden’s Frankenstein apparatus is its child. More.

The Hands of Orlac (1924). Robert Wiene reunited with Conrad Veidt for the body-horror premise that will not die: a pianist loses his hands in a rail crash, receives a transplant, and becomes convinced the donor was a murderer. Veidt plays it entirely with his arms — the hands lead him around the frame like animals on a lead. Remade repeatedly, most notably as Mad Love (1935) with Peter Lorre, which is how the idea reached Hollywood.

Why the shadows work

A canon list earns its keep by explaining the technique, because the technique is what got inherited. Three innovations did the travelling.

The shadow moved from paint to light. Caligari’s shadows are literally brushed onto the flats, which is why they never change as an actor crosses the set — a limitation the film converts into delirium. Within two years Murnau and his cinematographers Fritz Arno Wagner and Günther Krampf were throwing real shadows with hard, single-source, low-angle lighting, and the difference is the whole future of the form. A painted shadow is a statement about a character. A thrown shadow precedes him: it enters the frame first, it is bigger than he is, and it arrives on the wall the heroine is looking at while she has her back turned. Every horror film since runs on that one discovery.

The camera came off its legs. Murnau and Karl Freund built what the Germans called the entfesselte Kamera, the unchained camera, on The Last Laugh (1924) — strapping it to a cameraman’s chest, mounting it on a bicycle, riding it down a wire — for the simple reason that a subjective horror needs to move like a body. The device that lets a slasher stalk in first person was invented in Babelsberg to convey the shame of a demoted hotel porter.

The impossible was built in the lens. Eugen Schüfftan devised his mirror process for Metropolis: a partially scraped mirror set at forty-five degrees reflects a miniature into the frame while live actors are seen through the scraped section, so a model city and a real person occupy one shot with no optical printing at all. It was cheaper than construction and it holds up on a modern transfer.

Then the country exported the lot. After 1933 the personnel scattered — Lang, Freund, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Conrad Veidt, Billy Wilder — and they took the lighting plan with them into two American genres. Freund shot Universal’s Dracula (1931) and directed The Mummy (1932); Ulmer made The Black Cat (1934); Siodmak spent the 1940s teaching film noir how to light a staircase. Weimar lost its film industry and American horror acquired one.

The end of the line

M (1931). Lang’s first sound film closes the movement by absorbing it. A child murderer (Peter Lorre) is hunted by the police and, more efficiently, by Berlin’s criminal underworld, who want their city back. The expressionist inheritance is all here — the shadow falling across the wanted poster, the empty stairwell, the balloon caught in the wires — deployed inside something that looks and behaves like a documentary. Lang uses sound as a weapon for the first time in cinema: Lorre’s whistling of Grieg identifies him, and the blind balloon-seller who recognises it does the work no eye could. The full case.

The cousins, and how to watch the lot

Vampyr (1932) is Danish-French, directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer, shot in France with German money and a German cinematographer, Rudolph Maté. Its gauze-diffused, light-leaking image was achieved by shooting through a fine mesh, and its dread is closer to Weimar than most Weimar. Call it a cousin — the argument is in Dreyer’s dream logic of dread. Häxan (1922) is Swedish, funded by Svensk Filmindustri, and belongs to its own category entirely; Benjamin Christensen’s documentary-horror hybrid is essential viewing and owes its look to the same European workshop culture.

Take Caligari first for the shock of the design, then Nosferatu for what happens when that design meets real weather, then M for the moment the style learns to talk. Eureka’s Masters of Cinema and Kino Lorber have restored most of this list, and several titles are in the public domain and available free at reputable archives — though the free copies are usually the bad ones, and these films are all image. Pay for the restoration. The whole point of the movement is what the light does to a wall, and a sixth-generation dupe cannot show you that.

The wider silent picture, including the Scandinavian and Soviet strands, is in the silent horror canon.