Expressionism, I see now, was an artistic movement that turned reality inside out: instead of showing life as it is, filmmakers reshaped it into jagged shadows, twisted buildings, and unsettling moods.
In Weimar Germany, in the years after the First World War, filmmakers created a style of movie that was unlike anything else available at the time.
German Expressionism in cinema was all about distorted sets, dramatic lighting, and exaggerated performances, all designed to make the inner world of fear, anxiety, or fantasy visible on screen.
It mattered because it showed film could be more than just a new type of theatre: instead, cinema could distort reality in order to reveal truth. Without German Expressionism, later genres like horror, science fiction, and film noir would look very different – if indeed they existed at all.
To get a sense of it, I watched two of the most famous examples: Nosferatu (1922) and Metropolis (1927). They are very different films – one about a vampire creeping through the shadows, the other about a futuristic city powered by oppressed workers – but both capture the essence of Expressionist cinema.
They also showed me how much cinema was able to achieve through atmosphere, visuals, and sheer creativity, even when the technology of filmmaking was in its infancy.
Why Nosferatu and Metropolis?
If you only watch two Expressionist films, these are the ones to go for. Nosferatu, directed by F.W. Murnau, is essential because it brings Expressionism into horror. It’s an unauthorised version of Dracula, adapted to a bucolic German location and both stranger and scarier than a simple gothic tale. Its use of shadows, eerie landscapes, and the monstrous Count Orlok set the template for almost every vampire film that followed. In particular, the shot of Count Orlok’s shadow climbing the wall of the stairs is iconic and has been endlessly replicated ever since.
Metropolis, directed by Fritz Lang, is equally crucial, but in a different way. It shows the Expressionist style as applied to science fiction. Where Nosferatu creeps through darkened rooms, Metropolis dazzles with monumental cityscapes and futuristic machines. The film sets out to imagine the future – and remarkably, almost a century later, its vision of skyscrapers, underground workers, and robots still feels familiar, especially to anyone who has seen Bladerunner or The Fifth Element.
Both films, in their own ways, opened doors to what cinema could be.
Nosferatu – a shadow of fear
At its core, Nosferatu is the story of Hutter, who travels to Transylvania to arrange a property deal and discovers his client is a vampire. The vampire, Count Orlok, takes a shine to a miniature portrait of Hutter’s wife (specifically, her “pretty neck”) and follows him back to Germany, bringing death and plague along with him.
The only way to defeat Orlok is through the self-sacrifice of a woman, who must freely offer her own blood to distract the vampire until dawn, when the sunlight will destroy him.
The story is based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and his estate successfully sued for copyright infringement when Nosferatu was released. All copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed and only a few survived, which makes it all the more remarkable to watch now, knowing that it was almost lost to history.
The plot itself is easy enough to follow, but what struck me most wasn’t the story, but rather was the film’s aesthetics.
Unlike later Draculas, there’s nothing suave or aristocratic about Count Orlok – instead, he’s a grotesque creature with a bald head, pointed ears, and claw-like fingers. His shadow stretches menacingly up staircases and across walls.
The film has a dream-like quality to it, slipping between strange landscapes and unsettling images: there is action and plot but it’s not the type of narratively tight story that we’re more used to in modern cinema. Even when not much is happening (which is quite a lot more often than I’d expect from a modern film) the mood hangs over everything like mist.
For me, the brilliance of Nosferatu lies in its atmosphere. Even without sound, it manages to feel creepy, even more of an achievement given that the special effects are so old (although they were groundbreaking at the time, of course). The use of shadows is extraordinary – they seem to have a life of their own, creeping along walls before Orlok even appears and there’s a beauty to it which makes it worth watching, although the middle part drags a little.
Quite a bit of it was shot outside, rather than in a studio, which was unusual at the time but really adds to the atmosphere.
I also appreciated how nature itself becomes part of the horror: the winds pick up, rats pour into the city, the landscape looks barren and haunted. All of this adds up to make it feel bigger than just one vampire attacking people, and more like the world itself being corrupted.
It’s all very symbolic, but without being heavy-handed.
Max Schreck as Count Orlok is unforgettable. He doesn’t just play a monster; he fully embodies the role. Every movement is stiff and unnatural, as if he’s not fully human, but he’s never melodramatic or exaggerated. His performance is surely why the film is still unsettling today.
Unfortunately I found Hutter to be less convincing – he seems to be constantly giggling, like some sort of deranged fool, and while I know that acting was often exaggerated in silent films for obvious reasons, to me he comes across as slightly unhinged rather than as a convincing protagonist.
Much of what we now associate with screen vampires (death by sunlight, creeping around, fangs, coffins, old castles, etc etc), comes from this film, so even if you’ve never watched a silent film before it will feel familiar rather than alien. Nosferatu went on to influence not only horror films but also film noir and the way in which filmmakers in various genres ever since have portrayed fear and dread.
It’s a pleasure to watch, and a wonderful example of how powerful simple gesture, atmosphere, and visual rhythm can be in terms of making a movie that’s both entertaining and very, very creepy.
Metropolis – a city divided
If Nosferatu is a nightmare, Metropolis is a dream of the future – sometimes dazzling, sometimes hallucinatory, but always spectacular.
Metropolis tells the story of a futuristic city divided between the ruling class, who live in towering skyscrapers, and the workers, who toil underground to keep the machines running. The main character, Freder, is the privileged son of the city’s master. When he falls in love with Maria, a woman who preaches peace to the workers, he descends into the lower depths and discovers their suffering.
Meanwhile, a scientist creates a robot double of Maria, designed to incite chaos among the workers. The robot-Maria dances seductively in the upper city, corrupting the elite, while also urging the workers to revolt violently. The rebellion nearly destroys the city, until Freder helps reconcile the two classes, fulfilling Maria’s vision of a “mediator between the head and the hands.”
Released in 1927 during the heyday of Weimar Germany, it reflects both optimism regarding technology and fear of its dehumanising potential, a dichotomy we still see playing out in sci-fi today.
I was surprised at how risqué some of it was, especially some of the scanty costumes and sexualised dancing – while I knew that the roaring 20s were especially wild in Weimar Germany, I somehow thought that this was restricted to clubs rather than committed to film, but clearly I was wrong.
Like Nosferatu, Metropolis was also almost lost to history when the original cut was butchered after release, losing nearly a quarter of its footage. This meant that for decades there was no complete version, until an almost-complete print was discovered in Argentina, allowing the film to be restored and released with only a little of it missing.
This is an extremely long film. It’s over two and a half hours long and it really feels it, given the drawn-out plot and melodramatic acting.
However, the sets are beautiful: skyscrapers connected by sky-bridges, with planes and vehicles flying between them; giant machines pounding away; floods sweeping through underground tunnels. Considering this was made in 1927, these aspects feel almost astonishingly modern. You can see that the sets are models, with clever use of lights, and cameras used with extraordinary imagination, and this makes it better somehow – there’s no CGI or computer animation here. And then there’s the robot – a dazzling creation that prefigures decades of science fiction, the design has influenced countless later iterations including CP30 in Star Wars. The scene where she transforms from machine to human is still hypnotic.
The themes are powerful but clumsily handled; it’s a story about inequality, about how society runs on the labour of those who are invisible, and while the message seems heartfelt it’s hammered home so repeatedly and simplistically that it loses meaning.
With Metropolis, it took more effort for me to pay attention all the way through, but the beautiful visuals helped.
The old and new faces of fear
Watching both films together, I was struck by how different they are on the surface yet how much they share psychologically. Nosferatu is stripped-down, spare, atmospheric and primal in its dread, while Metropolis is sprawling, operatic and busy, with thousands of extras and much more elaborate sets, but they are both fundamentally about fear: ancient fears of death, the plague and the supernatural in the case of Nosferatu, while Metropolis explores more modern anxieties such as where class struggle and the rise of technology.
Nosferatu has a dream-like (or perhaps nightmarish) quality, but Metropolis also feels like a dream of the future, although it’s frenetic rather than dreamy in terms of atmosphere. Both films use exaggerated imagery, whether twisted shadows or towering machines, to make abstract fears tangible. Both also suggest a world out of balance, where humanity is threatened, whether by nature or technology.
There’s a timelessness to these themes that still resonates today, whether it’s fear of a new pandemic or an influx of outsiders, or the fear of AI, automation and the ever-present spectre of inequality.
To be honest, I’m not sure whether it’s reassuring or depressing to see that these films, made about a hundred years ago, are wrestling with the same issues we have today.
German Expressionism may have been born in the shadows of post-war Germany, but its influence has never died. Horror films still use the stretched shadows and visual grammar of Nosferatu. Science fiction still borrows the futuristic towers and robots of Metropolis.
Seen together, Nosferatu and Metropolis are like the twin grandparents of modern genre cinema, giving us the blueprints for horror and sci-fi that are still in use today. Both films showed that even at the dawn of cinema, as a medium it could be used not just to capture stories, but the collective fears of civilisation itself.
Conclusion
Coming to these films as someone who knows very little about cinema, I wasn’t sure if the outdated effects would feel comical, or whether the themes they explore would feel resonant today, but both films felt startlingly alive – through creeping dread in one case and through the spectacular artwork and vibrancy in the other.
Neither film is perfect but they were both worth watching, and I will be tucking Nosferatu away in my new list of most memorable films that I’ve watched (Metropolis a bit less so, perhaps).
I especially loved how the filmmakers of Weimar Germany didn’t just focus on storytelling but instead explored the ways that cinema could be used to explore ideas using aesthetics, imagery and atmosphere. As someone who loves visual art, it helped to open up a new side of cinema to me which I’d never really considered, and which I’m sure will continue to show up as I work my way forwards through cinema history.
They also showed me that there was nothing primitive about filmmaking in the 1920s. Instead, here was an era of radical artistry and technical daring in a brand-new medium. It must have been such an exciting time to be making movies: total freedom to create something completely new and never done before.
Join me next month when I move on to look at the early ‘talkies’, the dawning of Hollywood’s Golden Age. And let me know if there are any other German Expressionist films I should add to my watchlist – I’d love to hear your thoughts!