Out of the very few silent films I’ve ever seen in my life, I found The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari seemed both incredibly well-developed and well performed. One of my favorite features of this silent film is the fact that the surroundings are obscure at many times, hard to discern. In fact, most of the environment around the actors is either too heavily shadowed to be discernible or intentionally ambiguous. For this reason, I felt it was easier to focus on the main storyline of the film and to follow purely the actors and actresses. In films and movies these days, the surroundings and the landscapes often take us away from the main plot and create a distraction. However, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari made me realize the drastic difference between the “first true horror film” and the horror films we have today. What we can consider to be corny was viewed as incredibly revolutionary in the 1920s, and what we perceive as “banal horror” was incredibly shocking and effective to the earlier audience. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was produced in the 1920s- a time where ostentatious music was not uncommon and where dramatics and theatrics were common even in everyday society. Nowadays, we might find the “scary music” featured in this film as incredibly corny, but an audience in the 1920s, post World War I, would have found this music and the scenes that accompanied it to be incredibly engaging. The characters featured in this film were dynamic and well produced, and in the `1920s would have been considered to be the epitome of a horror film villain and protagonist.
If I were to create a murder-mystery set in modern day New York City, I would want my crime scene to take place in the most well-known areas of New York City, such as Chelsea or the Upper East Side. What we consider to be the most “affluent” and most “untouchable” neighborhoods of this city would be rocked with a stream of unsolvable and horrifying murders. I would choose these neighborhoods as the sites of my film because there is a stigma that surrounds neighborhoods outside of these wealthy, affluent areas that are given a bad reputation and a cold judgement because of the standard of living that exists within these “outside communities.” Areas within Queens such as Jackson Heights or Sunnyside, or neighborhoods within Brooklyn such as Park Slope or Sheepshead Bay are regarded with distaste and spoken of with a turned-up nose. Many residents within the “best” areas of Manhattan see the outside boroughs and less-prominent neighborhoods only as crime and poverty ridden. My murder-mystery film would feature a string of murders taking place in Chelsea, the Upper East Side, the Upper West Side and Soho. These murders would leave people baffled and fearful in neighborhoods they once deemed as infallible and untouchable. The reality I hope to give to my viewers is less about the reality of the crime itself, but the truth about humanity, regardless of the neighborhood you live in or the status of a name. It is too often forgotten that money and wealth cannot buy everything- least of all the goodness of humanity.
