Metropolis (1927) is probably the most well-known silent-era German expressionist film, closely followed by Nosferatu (1922). But pre-dating both yet just as influential is Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920): everything from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to Edward Scissorhands (1990) can be in some way traced back to this important work, but so can A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and The Sixth Sense (1999) as well.
This is one of the first bona fide horror films and the first to employ a twist-ending. More importantly, it was the first film to place a real narrative in a very unreal-looking world. The sets are truly staggering, looking like reality as seen in a fun-house mirror. Nothing exists at right-angles, with walls lurching in on the characters and trees almost seeming to grasp at passers-by (cue Snow White). Even makeup is, at times, heavily stylised, with flat-white faces and dark, ominous eyes marking-out one character in particular (cue Edward Scissorhands). The world as we know it has been twisted, distorted, up-ended in a nightmarish landscape that threatens with its stark, foreboding design.
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Some films are safely quirky, such as Little Miss Sunshine or Juno. Some films are odd or slightly disturbing, such as Brazil. Then there’s the nightmarish territory of Eraserhead, Videodrome and Tetsuo: the Iron Man, where plausibility gives way to perverse streams of consciousness.
I was probably about four years old when my grandfather first told me the legend of Sweeney Todd, the crazed barber who slit his patrons’ throats before having their flesh baked into delicious meat pies. The tale, while more than likely apocryphal, touches on several fears close to most people’s hearts, not the least of which is unwittingly eating a fellow human being (and worse still, actually enjoying it).
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