German Expressionist cinema, canonized by Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), built its dread from hand-painted oblique shadows, jagged distorted sets, and acute angles raked across a black-and-white silent frame. Original nitrate prints were exhibited color-tinted — amber for daylight, steel-blue for night.

The defining look is the near-black projected frame edged by painted Caligari shadows: the world is bent, the light is a knife, the dark is alive.