The term gaslight has gained so much trac­tion in pop­u­lar dis­course so recent­ly that you’d swear it was coined around 2010. In fact, that par­tic­u­lar usage goes at least as far back as 1938, when British nov­el­ist and play­wright Patrick Hamil­ton wrote a stage thriller about a hus­band who sur­rep­ti­tious­ly rearranges things in the house so as to make his wife believe that she’s gone insane. Gas Light proved enough of a hit to be adapt­ed for the cin­e­ma two years lat­er, with the two words of its title stream­lined into one. You can watch Thorold Dick­in­son’s Gaslight just above, and if you enjoy it, have a look at the rest of the more than 70 lit­er­ary movies col­lect­ed into this playlist from the ver­i­fied YouTube chan­nel Cult Cin­e­ma Clas­sics.

If you know your cin­e­ma his­to­ry, you’ll know that Gaslight was remade in Hol­ly­wood in 1944, direct­ed by George Cukor and star­ring Charles Boy­er, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cot­ten, and Angela Lans­bury. (That ver­sion inspired Steely Dan’s song “Gaslight­ing Abbie,” where I first heard the word myself.)

In those days, the Amer­i­can film indus­try looked to the British one for proven mate­r­i­al — mate­r­i­al the British film indus­try, for its part, had found in lit­er­a­ture. Take the work of a ris­ing young direc­tor called Alfred Hitch­cock, who adapt­ed Charles Ben­net­t’s Black­mail in 1929, John Buchan’s The Thir­ty-Nine Steps in 1935, Joseph Con­rad’s The Secret Agent as Sab­o­tage in 1936, and Daphne du Mau­ri­er’s Jamaica Inn in 1939.

Today, lit­er­ary adap­ta­tion seems to have become a rel­a­tive­ly niche prac­tice in Hol­ly­wood, but in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, it had real cachet: hence the increas­ing ambi­tion of pro­duc­tions like The Scar­let Let­ter (1934), Of Mice and Men 1939, Fleis­ch­er Stu­dios’ ani­mat­ed Gul­liv­er’s Trav­els (1939), The Snows of Kil­i­man­jaro (1952), and Jane Eyre (1970). Nat­u­ral­ly, these films reflect their own eras as much as they do the autho­r­i­al visions of Hawthorne, Stein­beck, Swift, Hem­ing­way, and Char­lotte Bron­të. Each of these pic­tures offers its own way of regard­ing its source mate­r­i­al. And would it seem so insane to believe that some of them may even have influ­ence still to exert on pop­u­lar cul­ture here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry? Watch the playlist of 70 lit­er­ary films here.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch Very First Film Adap­ta­tions of Shakespeare’s Plays: King John, The Tem­pest, Richard III & More (1899–1936)

The First-Ever Film Ver­sion of Lewis Carroll’s Tale Alice in Won­der­land (1903)

Watch the Trail­er for the Long-Lost First Film Adap­ta­tion of The Great Gats­by (1926)

When François Truf­faut Made a Film Adap­ta­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 (1966)

Watch the Huge­ly-Ambi­tious Sovi­et Film Adap­ta­tion of War and Peace Free Online (1966–67)

Watch an 8‑Part Film Adap­ta­tion of Tolstoy’s Anna Karen­i­na Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In a future where human­i­ty has been dri­ven under­ground by an apoc­a­lyp­tic event, a pris­on­er is haunt­ed by the child­hood mem­o­ry of see­ing a man gunned down at an air­port. A group of sci­en­tists make him their time-trav­el­ing guinea pig, hop­ing that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the soci­ety they once knew. In one of his forced jour­neys into the past, he falls for a strange­ly famil­iar-look­ing woman who con­vinces him not to return to his own time peri­od. Alas, things go wrong, cul­mi­nat­ing in the final real­iza­tion that the death he had wit­nessed so long ago was, in fact, his own.

You may rec­og­nize this as the plot of Ter­ry Gilliam’s 12 Mon­keys, from 1995, and also as the plot of Chris Mark­er’s La Jeteé, from 1962. 12 Mon­keys, a full-scale Hol­ly­wood pic­ture star­ring the likes of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, attained crit­i­cal acclaim and box-office suc­cess. But La Jeteé, which inspired it, stands as the more impres­sive cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ment, despite — or per­haps owing to — its being a black-and-white short com­posed almost entire­ly of still pho­tographs. That unusu­al (and unusu­al­ly effec­tive) form is the sub­ject of the new video above from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

“When you think about it, Ter­ry Gilliam is using still images too,” says Puschak. “It’s just that he’s using 24 still images every sec­ond, while Mark­er uses, on aver­age, one image every four sec­onds.” In La Jeteé, we’re “forced to sit with every frame,” and thus to notice that “they’re dead: all move­ment is gone, and we’re left with these life­less frag­ments of time, an appro­pri­ate thing in a world oblit­er­at­ed by war.” Mark­er “shows us that the move­ment of mov­ing pic­tures, even though it resem­bles life, is illu­so­ry; it’s real­ly just anoth­er form of mem­o­ry, and mem­o­ry is always frag­men­tary and life­less, re-ani­mat­ed only by the mean­ing we impose on it from the present.”

Yet this pho­to-roman, as Mark­er calls it, does con­tain one mov­ing image, which depicts the lady with whom the pro­tag­o­nist gets involved wak­ing up on one of their morn­ings togeth­er. Puschak describes it as “in the run­ning for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cin­e­ma” and inter­prets it as say­ing that “love, human con­nec­tion some­how tran­scends, some­how escapes the trap of time. It may be cliché to say that, but there is noth­ing cliché about the way Mark­er shows it.”  Mark­er’s inven­tive nou­velle vague col­league Jean-Luc Godard once called cin­e­ma “truth 24 times per sec­ond” — a def­i­n­i­tion bro­ken wide open, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, by Mark­er him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet William Gib­son

Under­stand­ing Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Dis­trib­uted to High Schools in the 1970s

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In ear­ly 1920, posters began appear­ing all over Berlin with a hyp­not­ic spi­ral and the mys­te­ri­ous com­mand Du musst Cali­gari wer­den — “You must become Cali­gari.”

The posters were part of an inno­v­a­tive adver­tis­ing cam­paign for an upcom­ing movie by Robert Wiene called The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari. When the film appeared, audi­ences were mes­mer­ized by Wiene’s sur­re­al tale of mys­tery and hor­ror. Almost a cen­tu­ry lat­er, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari is still cel­e­brat­ed for its rare blend­ing of low­brow enter­tain­ment and avant-garde art. It is fre­quent­ly cit­ed as the quin­tes­sen­tial cin­e­mat­ic exam­ple of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, with its dis­tort­ed per­spec­tives and per­va­sive sense of dread.

Like many night­mares, Cali­gari had its ori­gin in real-life events. Screen­writer Hans Janowitz had been walk­ing late one night through a fair in Ham­burg’s red-light dis­trict when he heard laugh­ter. Turn­ing, he saw an attrac­tive young woman dis­ap­pear behind some bush­es in a park. A short time lat­er a man emerged from the shad­ows and walked away. The next morn­ing, Janowitz read in the news­pa­pers that a young woman match­ing the descrip­tion of the one he had seen had been mur­dered overnight at that very loca­tion.

Haunt­ed by the inci­dent, Janowitz told the sto­ry to fel­low writer Carl May­er. Togeth­er they set to work writ­ing a screen­play based on the inci­dent, draw­ing also on May­er’s unset­tling expe­ri­ence with a psy­chi­a­trist. They imag­ined a strange, bespec­ta­cled man named Dr. Cali­gari who arrives in a small town to demon­strate his pow­ers of hyp­no­tism over Cesare, a sleep­walk­er, at the local fair. A series of mys­te­ri­ous mur­ders fol­lows.

Janowitz and May­er sold their screen­play to Erich Pom­mer at Decla-Film. Pom­mer at first want­ed Fritz Lang to direct the film, but Lang was busy with anoth­er project, so he gave the job to Wiene. One of the most crit­i­cal deci­sions Pom­mer made was to hire Expres­sion­ist art direc­tor Her­mann Warm to design the pro­duc­tion, along with painters Wal­ter Reimann and Wal­ter Röhrig. As R. Bar­ton Palmer writes at Film Ref­er­ence:

The prin­ci­ple of War­m’s con­cep­tion is the Expres­sion­ist notion of Bal­lung, that crys­tal­liza­tion of the inner real­i­ty of objects, con­cepts, and peo­ple through an artis­tic expres­sion that cuts through and dis­cards a false exte­ri­or. War­m’s sets for the film cor­re­spond­ing­ly evoke the twists and turn­ings of a small Ger­man medieval town, but in a patent­ly unre­al­is­tic fash­ion (e.g., streets cut across one anoth­er at impos­si­ble angles and paths are impos­si­bly steep). The roofs that Cesare the som­nam­bu­list cross­es dur­ing his night­time depre­da­tions rise at unlike­ly angles to one anoth­er, yet still afford him pas­sage so that he can reach his vic­tims. In oth­er words, the world of Cali­gari remains “real” in the sense that it is not offered as an alter­na­tive one to what actu­al­ly exists. On the con­trary, War­m’s design is meant to evoke the essence of Ger­man social life, offer­ing a pen­e­trat­ing cri­tique of semi­of­fi­cial author­i­ty (the psy­chi­a­trist) that is soft­ened by the addi­tion of a fram­ing sto­ry. As a prac­tic­ing artist with a deep com­mit­ment to the polit­i­cal and intel­lec­tu­al pro­gram of Expres­sion­ism, Warm was the ide­al tech­ni­cian to do the art design for the film, which bears out War­m’s famous man­i­festo that “the cin­e­ma image must become an engrav­ing.”

The screen­writ­ers were dis­ap­point­ed with Wiene’s deci­sion to frame the sto­ry as a flash­back told by a patient in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. Janowitz, in par­tic­u­lar, had meant Cali­gari to be an indict­ment of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment that had recent­ly sent mil­lions of men to kill or be killed in the trench­es of World War I. “While the orig­i­nal sto­ry exposed author­i­ty,” writes Siegfried Kra­cauer in From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Psy­cho­log­i­cal His­to­ry of the Ger­man Film, “Wiene’s Cali­gari glo­ri­fied author­i­ty and con­vict­ed its antag­o­nist of mad­ness. A rev­o­lu­tion­ary film was thus turned into a con­formist one — fol­low­ing the much-used pat­tern of declar­ing some nor­mal but trou­ble­some indi­vid­ual insane and send­ing him to a lunatic asy­lum.”

In a pure­ly cin­e­mat­ic sense, of course, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari remains a rev­o­lu­tion­ary work. You can watch the com­plete film above. Or find it list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch the Quin­tes­sen­tial Vam­pire Film Nos­fer­atu

Watch the Cult Clas­sic Hor­ror Film Car­ni­val of Souls (1962)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More