Horror from Germany

Why it matters

German studios of the 1920s developed a style built on distorted sets, strong shadows and heightened acting. Directors used it to show characters' inner states, not just their surroundings.

The influence reached Hollywood, whose early monster films borrowed heavily from the look of these productions.

Germany matters to horror for a specific reason: it is where the genre first became a visual art. The country's film industry of the Weimar years, the period between the end of the First World War in 1918 and the Nazi takeover in 1933, produced a cluster of films that set the look of fear for generations. Their influence was not limited to the screen. They taught filmmakers elsewhere that a set, a shadow or a camera angle could say what dialogue could not, and that the monsters of the genre could be shaped as much by design as by story.

The starting point is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which premiered at the Marmorhaus in Berlin on February 26, 1920. Robert Wiene directed from a script by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, and the production company, Decla-Film, shot it on studio sets in Berlin-Weissensee. The designers Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig used angular, leaning, hand-painted scenery, and painted shadows onto the backdrops. The film reached New York in April 1921. It is usually treated as the founding work of German expressionist cinema, and the term caligarism came to describe other films that imitated its look. Its reported budget was about $12,000, a small sum even then.

Expressionism, in its simplest definition, is a style that shows how something feels instead of how it looks. In film, that meant distorted architecture, high-contrast lighting, strongly stylized acting and unusual camera angles, with techniques such as superimposition adding dreamlike effects. Writers have long linked it with the uncertainty of postwar Germany, although that link is an interpretation. What can be said with confidence is that the style was widely used during the Weimar years and that it traveled. The Golem: How He Came Into the World (1920), directed by Paul Wegener and Carl Boese, retold a Jewish folktale about a clay figure brought to life, in a gothic setting.

Then came the work of F. W. Murnau. His Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, produced by Prana Film, a company that made only this one picture before going bankrupt. The sets, costumes and publicity were designed by Albin Grau. Murnau shot much of the film outdoors, in Wismar and other northern towns and in Slovakia, a decision that gave the film a physical, haunted-landscape quality that distinguishes it from the studio-built worlds of Caligari. The Stoker estate sued, and a court ordered the copies destroyed, yet prints survived. The film's long afterlife is the subject of the vampire profile.

Other German films broadened the repertoire. Waxworks, directed by Paul Leni and shown in Berlin in November 1924, was an anthology with Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt and Werner Krauss. Its stories are told by a poet who is hired to invent tales for wax figures, an early example of the framed, multi-part structure that later became a staple of horror. The Last Laugh (1924) by Murnau and Metropolis (1927) by Fritz Lang are not horror films in the strict sense, but they show how the same visual ideas were applied to other kinds of stories.

The studios of the era were another part of the story. The production company Ufa distributed Waxworks, and its facilities and craftspeople were an important reason German films looked the way they did. When the Nazis took power in 1933, the Reichsfilmkammer was founded in mid-1933 and Jewish and foreign professionals were excluded from the industry. According to film histories, around 1,500 film professionals emigrated. Several of them, including the cinematographer Karl Freund and the directors Joe May and Robert Siodmak, later worked on horror films at Universal in the 1930s and 1940s. That movement is a big part of why Hollywood's early monster pictures look the way they do, with deep shadows, angular sets and emotional exaggeration.

A line from German silent cinema also runs through Murnau's own career. He made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) in the United States, and the film shows how German visual techniques fed into American filmmaking. Paul Leni directed the haunted-house comedy The Cat and the Canary (1927). Their American work belongs to the history of Hollywood, but its roots are in the German studios. For a broader view, see the birth of horror cinema timeline and the 1920s guide.

The years after the Second World War were less well known for horror. West German studios made several horror films in the 1960s, some starring Christopher Lee, and the Rialto Film company produced its Edgar Wallace crime films, known as Krimis, between 1959 and 1972. These are generally described as related to horror but distinct from it. New German Cinema, which emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, led filmmakers to look at the national past with fresh eyes, and in 1979 Werner Herzog released Nosferatu the Vampyre, a homage to Murnau's film.

Herzog's film was made in German and English versions, with Klaus Kinski as the vampire, Isabelle Adjani and Bruno Ganz in the cast. Town scenes were shot in Delft in the Netherlands, standing in for Wismar, and the Transylvanian sequences were filmed in Czechoslovakia. Herzog preferred to call it a homage or a free version instead of a remake. For viewers, it is a useful companion piece to the 1922 film, since you can compare two different ideas of the same story, one built on shadow and gesture, the other on color, landscape and slow pacing.

It is worth being clear about what this page does not claim. It covers the periods in which German cinema had the most documented influence on horror. It does not attempt a full survey of every German horror film, and where a detail could not be confirmed from published sources, it has been left out. The library's catalog currently includes only one German film, but the country's influence reaches into many others, as the links below suggest.

To explore further, read the profile of F. W. Murnau, the supernatural horror page and the entry for Nosferatu. The Movie Explorer can filter by country, and the Horror by decade pages show how the German 1920s relate to what followed. The sections on sound help explain how later films replaced the music of the silent era with other tools for creating fear.

Films from or co-produced in Germany