The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Having missed last year's HorrorFest Finale of Terminatryx and Lark's original, live soundtrack to Nosferatu, I made damn sure I didn't miss this year's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. I'd only ever seen snippets of the film on YouTube and, like all 70+ year old black and white silent movies it looks cheesy, corny and quite silly. But all that changed on the 31st of Oct 2007. Watching a classic like Caligari in a darkened theatre with a live 21st Century soundtrack suddenly brings back the scale of this picture.

What a fucking masterpiece - instead of giggling at the screen I found myself suddenly entranced. Hanging on every (written) word. The score, composed and performed by Paul and Sonja from Terminatryx, Sean and Fuzzy from Lark and The Crackpot Realists was beautifully pieced together, altogether haunting and kickass with a combination of acoustic and electronic sounds with vocal contortions supplied by Sonja and one of the Crackpot Realists. What they manage to achieve is to completely revitalise this classic.

For the first time I found myself completely enthralled by a silent movie - marvelling at the stylistic approach to the film making, finding the obvious inspirations of such great genre directors as Tim Burton and Sam Raimi.
With their soundtrack they managed to make classic breathe again, resurrecting it for a new generation of film-makers to marvel at the magic of silver screen.
Rumour has it they might be doing Metropolis next year - I can't wait.

Check below for some clips from the night.
The First clip has been synced up with the actual video of Caligari.
Apologies for audio this was recorded on my phone :)