It's the year 1920, World War One had just ended about a year ago and the allies won, but there were lots of hatred towards the German people, especially the government, as even the Germans started to feel a sense of betrayal and resentment towards their own government. Thanks to the aftermath of World War One and the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was forced to pay up their debt to the war, which let them in one of the most great depressions and hyperinflation that Germany as ever experience. It was so bad that basically the money that the German people did had was nothing more than a worthless piece of paper. The only companies that did gain benefit from their money were film companies.

The movie industry from Germany was starting to catch up and starting to become popular from both nation audiences to international audiences based the films that were made in Germany. Because Germany doesn't want to imported foreign films, filmmakers have to make their own films and because of limited amount of money they had, directors and even film artist have the most freedom to make any kind of movies they want to make as long as it was cheap. This led to one of the most important and popular genres from Germany and the film industry as a whole, these were known as German Expressionism. Consider to be the early versions of horror and film noir, Expressionism was a style used during the Weimar Republic, especially in Berlin. These were films that stayed away from realism and focus more on creativity when it came to the stories and the sets. The stories would focus more on a dark side of a human, such as greed and revenge type stories or sometimes also focusing on supernatural and sci fi elements and it would sometimes been seen from a main character's perspective.

One of these movies that help popularize the genre was a film called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The idea for the movie came about when two men, one named Hans Janowitz and the other Carl Mayer, had a strong hatred towards authority figures after their not so pleasant experience during World War One. For Hans, he served as one of the military officers for Germany and he had a pretty rough experience with the military during the war. As for Mayer he faked madness in order for him to avoid the war and as such he was put into a nuthouse and was being examined by a military psychiatrist and this also led Mayer to be distrustful towards the military was well and the psychiatrist also served as a model for the Dr. Caligari character. Later in June of 1918, the two men met each other through the help of actor Ernst Deutsch and getting some encouragement from Gilda Langer a friend of Janowitz, the two men decided to write a movie based on both of the men's distrust with authority figures.

Now although both Janowitz and Mayer had never worked in filming or writing a film script before, they were able to finish the script in just about six weeks from February to March of 1919 and there were lots of influence from both the men's personal experience that went into the movie, for example when the movie was still in the writing stage, Gilda was the based for one of the main characters in the movie named Jade and she was originally chosen to play the character in the movie, however before the movie was green lighten, Gilda encouraged Janowitz to see a fortune teller and when he did the fortune teller told him that he would survive the war, but Langer will die very young and sure enough she did after she encountered with the Spanish flu and died at the age of 23 on January 31st, 1920. This little event that happen was used as a plot point in the movie in which the character Cesare the somnambulist predicted the character Alan's death in the movie and this was one of many influence that would inspired these two writers to used these for their movie.

By the time the script for the movie was done, the two men along with German director Fritz Lang, showed the script to head production of Decla-Bioscop, Erich Pommer. Pommer asked the men to leave the script at his desk and he'll look it over, but when Mayer read the script out loud to Pommer, he was really impressed with how cheap this film could be made and he purchased the script from them that same night.

So with everything purchase the film went into production began around the end of December of 1919. Originally Fritz Lang was the chosen director for this movie, but because he was too busy working on his own little movie called The Spiders the directing role was given to Robert Wiene instead. The making of the sets and costumes for the movie was handled by three men, Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Rohrig. When Wiene present Warm the script for the movie, Warm agreed that an Expressionism style would be best suited for the story. The team build the sets using paints on canvas and paper and even most of the shadows were also painted on the wall. There were also no exterior shots, which was a bit unusual for films at the time, the camera was mostly there to show the sets and nothing more, there were some close ups and panning movements here and there. So the movie was treated almost more like a stage play than a cinematic movie, but the producers loved the sets and were so impress by them that they gave the artist the freedom to make the sets however they see fit, as long as it stays within their budget.

So with the sets taken care the team went and hold audition for actors to their movie. The two main villains, Dr. Caligari was intended to be played by either Werner Krauss or Paul Wegener, but Werner accepted the role, asking if he could make some changes to his make up and costume, to which they accepted. The role for Cesare the somnambulist went to Conrad Veidt, both of these actors have worked in some type of Expressionist style in theaters before, so they were both conformable on what they needed to do.

So the big thing that this movie is most remembered for was that this was one of the earliest films to have a frame story and the first ever film to have a twist ending, so spoilers… but in the movie, the whole story of Caligari is told by our main character Francis and he tells this old guy about his experience in figuring out who Caligari his and gets him tried and arrested for murder, but it turns out that at the end of the film he's actually one of Caligari's metal patients and it's very possible that the whole story he told was a complete lie and he's crazy.

Now this sort of frame story was not feature in the original script, in the original script, the movie actually opens to a party hosted by are two main characters, Francis and Jane, and the guests asks Francis to tell the story of what happened to him 20 years ago. This part of the frame story was changed to the version we have today. Wiene liked the idea of having a story being a complete lie and agree to the change, but both Janowitz and Mayer were opposed to the idea of adding a frame story and even going so far as to say that they turned their film into a cliche, but the change was still made in the end.

The film was released on February 26th, 1920 at the Marmorhaus, in Berlin. It was a huge succeeded when it was premiered in theaters so much so that it was shown in theaters for four weeks, which was amazing at the time.

It got some various different views from critics, with some really praising the heck out of the movies visuals and actors, while others thought the film was too high-brow to become popular in Germany. It was the same reaction when this film was released worldwide. While some people were still distrustful to the Germans after World War One, others have calmed down and allowed to show German films to the public in other countries.

Today this film is one of the most important and loved films by most film buffs and horror buffs, with people calling it the first true horror film and there were lots of things this movie did that left inspirations towards future films, it help start the creepy and horror genre, help start the aspects of makeup in horror films, as well it help establish the important of twist and twist ending especially and this would lead to many more horror film with the same look and feel that Caligari had with movies like Nosferatu, Metropolis and even American monster horror films. It's also still talked about the idea of someone who is crazy to the reality of what's going on the movie and it's also talked about for the similarities between the Dr. Caligari character and the German military using their own people to commit horrible crimes.