The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
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40 free The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is over a century old and still looks like nothing else: leaning walls, crooked streets, and a fairground showman whose servant Cesare does his killing for him. It helped prove that a film could look like a nightmare on purpose, and horror has borrowed from it ever since. This quiz covers the story from the fair to the final reveal, the cast and the writers who dreamed it up after the First World War, the choices behind its strange look, how audiences and critics around the world received it, and the remakes, music videos and villains that carry its fingerprints. It is for silent-film fans, horror buffs and film students revising a course staple. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you will leave knowing more than when you started.
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Q 01The actor who played Cesare in Caligari later starred in The Man Who Laughs, the visual model for which Batman villain?
The Joker
The Joker owes his fixed grin to the actor's 1928 role as Gwynplaine, a man whose face has been cut into a permanent smile.
Q 02Which actor played Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and, decades later, a Nazi major in Casablanca?
Conrad Veidt
Conrad Veidt fled Germany in 1933 with his Jewish wife, and Major Strasser in Casablanca was the last of his roles released in his lifetime.
Q 03What is the storyteller Franzis revealed to be in the twist ending of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?
An asylum inmate
An asylum inmate is what Franzis turns out to be, and the man he calls Caligari is the kindly director, who says he finally knows how to cure him.
Q 04The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is the best-known film of which art movement, seen in its jagged sets?
Expressionism
German Expressionism reached the cinema late: several well-known writers had already pronounced the movement dead by the time the film opened.
Q 05How did the designers of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari create many of its shadows and streaks of light?
Painted them on the sets
The designers painted them on the sets to guarantee a dark, unreal look, and a test scene so impressed the producers that the artists were given free rein.
Q 06The 1962 film The Cabinet of Caligari was scripted by Robert Bloch, whose novel became which Hitchcock film?
Psycho
Psycho author Bloch never meant to write a remake at all: the director forced the Caligari title onto his untitled screenplay.
Q 07Which band's video for the song Otherside borrowed the Gothic look of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?
Red Hot Chili Peppers
Red Hot Chili Peppers made a video that also drew on Cubism and M. C. Escher, and its directors said they had to work around the film's style to avoid copying it.
Q 08Which rock musician co-directed a 1999 music video whose imagery was modelled on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?
Rob Zombie
Rob Zombie co-directed the Living Dead Girl video with Joseph Kahn, and Sheri Moon Zombie plays the Cesare part.
Q 09Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is billed as a somnambulist, an old-fashioned word for what?
A sleepwalker
A sleepwalker is what the showman presents at the fair: Cesare lies in a coffin-like box until he is woken to answer the crowd's questions.
Q 10Siegfried Kracauer's famous 1947 book on German cinema is titled From Caligari to whom?
Hitler
Hitler completes the title: Kracauer argued that the tyrannical doctor and his obedient Cesare were premonitions of the dictator's rule over Germany.
Q 11The shadowy look of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari shaped which Hollywood style of the 1940s and 1950s?
Film noir
Film noir took on its stylised shadows and its habit of treating everyone, even the innocent, as an object of suspicion.
Q 12Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari helped inspire the 1930s monsters of which Hollywood studio?
Universal
Universal horror films such as Frankenstein, The Mummy and Bride of Frankenstein drew on the film's style and on Cesare in particular.
Q 13Which 1922 vampire film followed Caligari's lead in using shadow to reveal its characters' minds?
Nosferatu
Nosferatu, directed by F. W. Murnau, was among the German films that took up its use of setting, light and shadow to represent psychology.
Q 21Which director was first choice for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari but was busy filming The Spiders?
Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang, later the director of Metropolis and M, got as far as holding script talks with one of the writers before leaving.
Q 22Which Swedish director did film historian Roy Armes call the true heir of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?
Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman earned the label for black-and-white films that recall 1920s German cinema, though he himself played down the influence.
Q 23Reviewer Danny Peary named The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari cinema's first example of which type of movie?
Cult film
Cult film status began here, in Peary's view, and he also saw the picture as a precursor of arthouse cinema.
Q 14The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was released in 1920, during which period of German history?
The Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic produced a run of films that followed its lead, pitting ordinary people against brutal and irrational authority.
Q 15Which American critic called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari arguably the first true horror film?
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert made the claim in a review that lingers on the film's tilted walls, impossible staircases and knife-like grass.
Q 16Shown Cesare's corpse, the raging Dr. Caligari is overpowered and put into what?
A straitjacket
A straitjacket ends his rampage after he attacks a member of staff, and he is locked up in the very place he ran.
Q 17Sent to kill the sleeping Jane in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, what does Cesare do instead?
Abducts her
Cesare abducts her after a struggle, dragging her out through the window; women at the premiere reportedly fainted during the scene.
Q 18At the fair in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Cesare foretells that Alan will live only until when?
Dawn the next day
Dawn the next day is the limit Cesare gives when Alan asks how long he has, and Alan is murdered that very night; one scholar linked the question to soldiers' fears in the First World War.
Q 19How is Alan murdered in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, in a killing shown only as a shadow?
Stabbed in bed
Stabbed in bed, Alan is killed off screen: only the shadows on the wall are shown, a lighting idea that later German films used often.
Q 20Unusually for a film of 1920, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was shot without any of which?
Exteriors
Exteriors were ruled out by the design: every street was built indoors, on sets that mostly measured no more than six metres across.
Q 24Who is the first murder victim in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, killed after making the doctor wait?
The town clerk
The town clerk shouts at the doctor from an absurdly high seat before approving his fair permit, and is killed that same night.
Q 25Chased by an angry mob in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, how does the fleeing Cesare meet his end?
Dies of exhaustion
Cesare dies of exhaustion, and one critic likened him to a machine running out of fuel once he strays too far from his master.
Q 26When Franzis and the police open the box in Dr. Caligari's cabinet, what is lying in Cesare's place?
A dummy
A dummy had been left in the box so the doctor looked innocent while the real Cesare was out; the doctor escapes in the confusion that follows.
Q 27In the closing scenes of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Jane is shown believing that she is what?
A queen
A queen is how Jane sees herself by the end, while Cesare turns out to be awake, quiet and not visibly dangerous.
Q 28How does Franzis learn of Dr. Caligari's secret obsession while the doctor lies asleep?
Reads his diary
Franzis reads his diary and records with the staff's help, learning of an 18th-century mystic who used a somnambulist to commit murders.
Q 29Erich Pommer said the Caligari writers saw an experiment, while he saw a film that could be made how?
Cheaply
Cheaply was the attraction: Pommer later said canvas scenery was chosen mainly because it cost far less than building sets.
Q 30Which director followed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with the similar horror film Genuine?
Robert Wiene
Robert Wiene got the job only when the first-choice director dropped out, and in the 1930s he tried to remake the film with sound.