31 Days of Horror: Days 6 and 7

I missed day six because my girlfriend, Vicki, and I watched several episodes of “The Walking Dead,” which is horror, but this blog series is about horror movies not TV shows.  This put me two movies behind, so tonight I had a double feature:  “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) and “The Awful Dr. Orlof” (1964), which make a nice combination, since “Orlof” was heavily influenced by “Caligari.” 

One of the first horror movies ever made and my favorite silent movie, “Caligari” tells the story of a murdering hypnotist posing as a carnival showman.  Dr. Caligari’s “cabinet,” which looks more like a coffin, contains a somnambulist, or sleepwalker, named Cesare, whom Caligari claims has slept day and night all 23 years of his life and can tell the future.  Dr. Caligari exhibits his cabinet at a fair in the town of Holsten Wall, and soon after his show begins, people start dying in the night, victims of Caligari, through Cesare, whom he sends to kill them.

What makes this movie so interesting is not its story, but the way it looks.  An iconic example of German expressionist film, “Caligari” uses sets in which everything is off kilter and out of proportion:  all the lines in the movie are jagged, including windowsills and door frames; buildings lean precariously; some rooms are much too small for their inhabitants; chairs have backs several times the size of their seats; and the town clerk sits in a chair that stands so tall his feet dangle several inches from the ground.  All of this creates the impression that the visuals are the product of deranged mind, and this is clearly the point, but it’s an open question whose madness these images externalize:  Caligari’s or the asylum patient who narrates the story?

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of “Caligari,” but for obvious examples, see Tim Burton’s entire filmography.  It had been several years since I had seen “Caligari,” and I’d forgotten how much fun it is to watch.  At times, it’s like watching a cartoon with live action characters.  If you’ve never seen a silent movie, there’s not a better place to start.

“The Awful Dr. Orlof” is an early work of Spanish director Jesus “Jess” Franco, who has made close to 200 movies.  The handful I’ve seen are all entertaining, but many are almost unwatchable.  He worked in every imaginable subgenre of horror, but  I prefer his mad scientist movies.  He made several good ones, including “The Diabolical Dr. Z” and “The Rites of Frankenstein,” and “Orlof” is probably the best.

With the help of his assistant, Morpho, Dr. Orlof abducts and murders women to use in experiments hoping to find a way to repair his daughter’s disfigured face.  He woos the women with drinks and a diamond necklace containing a tracking device that Morpho later uses to find them.  “Orlof” draws on several horror classics, most notably “Caligari,” “Frankenstein,” and “Dracula.”  Morpho is a combination of the monsters from all three, and Orloff is both Dr. Caligari and Victor Frankenstein.  He broke Morpho out of prison, altered his mind through brain surgery and thus placed him directly under his control.  When Morpho abducts the women for Orloff, he kills them by biting their necks.

With their willingness to abandon narrative coherence in favor of elaborate set pieces, European horror movies often do a better job of capturing the irrationality, surrealism, and illogic of true horror than American horror movies.  I’m not suggesting that American horror movies lack plot holes, but even when they reach the point of no return, they tend to keep trying to follow the plot.  European horror movies have no problem disregarding it completely in the interest unsettling their viewers.  At their worst, this makes them completely incomprehensible, and Franco was guiltier than most.  But this was less of a problem in the 1960s than it was later on.  Orlof benefits immensely from a lack of concern with narrative logic as its best scenes are elaborate chase sequences through a castle and a villa that make little sense from a purely narrative perspective but succeed brilliantly in horrifying viewers. 

I enjoy every subgenre of horror, and I don’t even try to pick a favorite, but I’m rarely disappointed by a mad scientist movie, so this subgenre clearly ranks near the top.  Tonight’s double feature enabled me to revisit two early classics and enjoy them with a bowl of Frankenberry.