A Symphony of Horror

Since it is Halloween and the nights are drawing in, a study of the seminal role the cinema industry of Weimar Germany played in the development of the horror film.

In February 1920, Berliners walked into a cinema on the Kurfürstendamm and came out having seen something that had never existed before: painted streets that leaned like drunks, a showman in white gloves, and a sleepwalker who had not opened his eyes in twenty-three years. Within three years the same broke, defeated, half-starved city had given the world a monster brought to life by a rabbi’s magic and a rat-toothed vampire whose shadow crept up a staircase. Between them, Caligari, The Golem and Nosferatu invented the horror film genre, and the story of how they were made is nearly as strange as the films themselves.

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Jason Collings
November 2026