Trivia / The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

• Completely Different Title:
  • Bulgaria: Dr. Caligari's Office
• Executive Meddling: A controversial example that's still debated by film historians:
  • According to Siegfried Kracauer's From Caligari To Hitler, the Twist Ending was originally the idea of a studio exec (sometimes credited as Fritz Lang himself), and it arguably makes the movie much more uncomfortable. Supposedly after screenings, a man would come out and reassure the audience that everything was going to be alright. Word of God stated that the film was supposed to represent what people in power could force others to do against their will, leaving them unresponsive shells who were a slave to the whims of those in power. Many historians view the changed ending as a sign that the audiences of the time weren't comfortable with the idea of questioning authority, even if that authority was corrupt and instigated them to do horrible things — a foreboding portent of things to come.
  • Fritz Lang claimed credit for the Framing Story, and was originally supposed to direct the film. From his perspective, the ending was merely an attempt to ground the nightmarish setting in some believable reality and the ending wasn't dictated by censorship or meddling. The interpretation that the end foreshadows later events or subservience to authority comes from Kracauer who Lang, himself an anti-Nazi exile, mocked for his one-note misreading of Weimar-era films. The tonal shift is stark, however, turning the Twist Ending into what can seem like an Ass Pull.
  • Additionally, the original screenplay was considered lost for decades, and writers like Kracauer had to rely on secondhand accounts of the film's production. Werner Krauss revealed near the end of his life that he had kept his copy of the shooting script, and donated it to a museum upon his death. This script showed that a framing device had been in the film all along, but it still differed significantly from the finished movie (Francis recounted the story of Caligari at his home, rather than an asylum, though it's still ambiguous whether or not he's an Unreliable Narrator).
• Referenced by...: In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Slappy Daze", Nosferatu comes down with a cold and Slappy takes him to the doctor. Said doctor is named Dr. Calimari, and his office is designed in a German expressionist style.
• Viral Marketing: One of the earliest examples, with posters reading "Du mußt Caligari werden!" ("You must be Caligari!"), with no explanation of who Caligari was or why the reader must become him, plastered all over German cities in the lead-up to the film's release.

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