The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari Study Questions

 1. The essential story is a narrator is telling a story to another man of how a man named Dr. Caligari presented his somnambulism at a town fair. After the fair, people are murdered, and an investigation is started. Dr. Caligari's assistant Cesare is eventually suspected of the murders. It turns out that Dr. Caligari is actually the head of an insane asylum and has been using Cesare, a somnambulist, to complete the murders. It returns to the narrator and the man, and at the end of the movie, it is revealed that the narrator is insane.

2. The film begins in the present and then becomes a flashback to an event in the narrator's life but returns to the present in the end. 

3. The use of lighting and shadows helps to add to the horror aspect of the film. In addition, the odd-shaped building helps to add to the eeriness of the film. 

4. The final "plot twist" is that the narrator is the insane one is the narrator, not Dr. Caligari. This then makes the audience question whether or not they can trust the story that the narrator is telling. 

5. The plot twist shows that the narrator is not always trustworthy. Narrators are the audience's way of hearing the story of the movie and are typically seen as trustworthy. In this case, the narrator is not necessarily trustworthy, which causes the audience to question how much of the story being told was true and how much was altered due to the fact that the narrator was insane. 

6.  The set design of the film shows that in early film making the set designs were simple in the fact that most things were stationary. The set designs were very similar to those used in plays. Nowadays the set designs are very complex and have many moving parts in the background. In addition, the colors of the movie were almost always monotone with most of the movie being in yellow and black. This might be due to the fact that the cameras couldn't capture color correctly back then. 

7. The unique set design of the film adds to the plot as the strange-shaped buildings and decorations represent the twisted mind of the narrator. The tilted buildings and odd angles create a strange feeling for the audience which helps to add to the suspense of the film. 

8. The set design of the movie, which is seen as the world's first horror film, helps to inspire future horror films that would use the set to try and add suspense to their movies. In the scene at the end of act 2, the audience sees the shadow of the murderer and victim fighting and the murderer killing the victim. This shot of the shadow of the killer has been used in many horror films and was more than likely inspired by this scene. 

9. One modern film that has traces of Caligari would be Fight Club in the sense that at the end of both films, the audience finds out that the narrator/main character is not trustworthy and insane, which makes the audience question what is true from the story and what was made up due to the untrustworthy narrator. 

10. The untrustworthy narrator allows the audience to experience the film in a unique way. The audience hears the story from a narrator they initially trust; however, by the end of the film they find out the narrator is insane and are left questioning what from the story actually happened and what was made up.