31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

As soon as people began making movies, they made them about gothic romances. Thomas Edison's 1910 Frankenstein was a very early example, but of course there were also '20s versions of Phantom of the Opera and Nosferatu, which was a bootleg of Dracula. And there were original gothic romance movies, too, like Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920.

Caligari was based on a script by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer and is reportedly the product of their dissatisfaction with German authority after World War I. The way that Janowitz and Mayer express this though is pure gothic romance. Dr Caligari may represent the abuse of power in German systems (what with using one of his patients in a horrific experiment and all), but he's also the classic, gothic oppressor. He's inspired by a murderous monk (hello, Matthew Lewis!) and uses his influence over sleepwalking Cesare to abduct the young Jane. Jane's handsome boyfriend then has to try to save her.

In addition to these tropes, Caligari also deals subtly with the theme of decay. There are no crumbling castles or musty mansions, but it's set in post-WWI Germany and reflects the national paranoia that marked that time. Germany had been humbled by the Treaty of Versailles and there was a strong sense that German society was deteriorating. That unease is reflected not only in the actions of Caligari's characters, but also in the bizarre, twisted design of the sets that depict a tumultuous and disturbed world.

31 Days of Gothic Romance | The Monk

I want to make it clear that my focusing on gothic romance for 31 days isn't because I'm some kind of expert on it. I love the genre, but I'm way under-read in it and one my reasons for doing this is to build a list of books and other things that I want to experience. Matthew Lewis' The Monk falls into that category.

The innovation that Lewis brought to the genre was luridness. It had been relatively chaste up to that point, with horrors mostly being threatened or suggested. Lewis' titular character doesn't just threaten and menace an innocent young woman; he does terrible things to her. And to other characters in order to get to her. And the novel spends a great deal of time chronicling the monk Ambrosio's fall into depravity. He's already not a nice guy as the novel opens - he's proud and he lusts after the Virgin Mary, to start with - and he sinks deeper from there, encouraged by supernatural forces.



The Monk ticks all the boxes expected of a gothic romance, but cranks them up to 11 in a way that made it as popular as it was condemned. People loved to talk about how blasphemous and immoral it was almost as much as they loved to read it.

One of the people it bothered was Anne Radcliffe, from yesterday, who liked to evoke chills by suggesting things unseen. Like Alfred Hitchcock, she believed that what the audience imagined was always more powerful than what was explicitly seen or described. Keeping the analogy of movie directors, Matthew Lewis was more like Wes Craven, wanting to horrify audiences with the gory details. It's probably not a coincidence then that Radcliffe published The Italian - her own story of a depraved clergyman who terrorizes a young woman - shortly after the release of The Monk. Even though I once swore off any more Radcliffe, I'm curious now to read and compare The Monk and The Italian.



I haven't read The Monk, but I have seen the 2011 film adaptation by director Dominik Moll, starring Vincent Cassel as Ambrosio. It's been a few years since I've seen it, but my memory is that it's a fairly faithful, if heavily abridged version of the novel's plot. I found it challenging, both in terms of artistic style and content, but I also loved it as a cautionary tale against giving in to selfish passions. I'm hoping to have the same reaction to Lewis' novel.