The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Robert Wiene's 1920 "Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari" ("The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari") became a worldwide success and had a lasting impact on the film world, particularly for horror. It was not so much the story but the style that made it distinguishable from other films, ""Dr. Caligari"'s settings, some simply painted on canvas backdrops, are weirdly distorted, with caricatures of narrow streets, misshapen walls, odd rhomboid windows, and leaning doorframes. Effects of light and shadow were rendered by painting black lines and patterns directly on the floors and walls of sets." Critic Roger Ebert called it arguably "the first true horror film", and film reviewer Danny Peary called it cinema's first cult film and a precursor to arthouse films. Considered a classic, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" helped draw worldwide attention to the artistic merit of German cinema and had a major influence on American films, particularly in the genres of horror and film noir, introducing techniques such as the twist ending and the unreliable narrator to the language of narrative film. Writing for the book "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", horror film critic Kim Newman called "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" "a major early entry in the horror genre, introducing images, themes, characters, and expressions that became fundamental to the likes of Tod Browning's "Dracula" and James Whales' "Frankenstein", both from 1931". "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" is also a leading example of what a German Expressionist film looks like.