Doug Jones

October 25, 2006 - Doug Jones is best known for roles where his face can’t be seen (Abe Sapien in Hellboy, Pan in Pan’s Labyrinth, the Silver Surfer in the upcoming Fantastic Four sequel), but the actor also has a varied career in lower-budgeted indie films - movies where he actually gets to take a break from wearing heavy make-up prosthetics. One such film is a remake of the classic silent horror picture The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which Image Entertainment and Dark Horse Entertainment will be releasing on DVD.

"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is another labor of love for me, another low budget, independent sort of production," Jones recently told IGN. "The original story [has been] rewritten as a screenplay by David Fisher, who also directed it and also did all of the visual effects on it."

The film will be the first release for the new alliance between Image and Dark Horse, and it will in fact be a two-disc set that also includes the original 1920 Caligari. But, as Jones explains, aspects of the original picture will also be present in the remake as well.

"The entire thing is a visual effects movie, because we used the original backdrops from the first Caligari," says the actor. "[Fisher] created matte shots off of the original film that we all acted on green screen in front of, so he’s [combining] us all together with the original film. In those old silent films there were lots of wide shots where the camera just sat still and everyone moved around in front of it kind of like in a play. Well, as people were moving around, he could get the information of the backdrop behind them as they moved, composite it all together as a matte shot with no people in it, put us on the green screen, and then marry the two later."

The idea behind the project was to maintain the original German Expressionism style and art direction of the 1920 film, but to expand on the storyline and fill in the plot holes that were a typical pitfall of silent era movies. The actors were dressed in the same costumes and make-up as the 1920 actors were, but this time they got to actually speak their lines - that’s something that the original players of course never had the chance to do.

"We all had a silent film look to us," says Jones. "The story is a bit expanded with the dialogue so there’s more storytelling being done. If you watch the original film first, the second one will answer a lot of questions you had about the first, because you know in a silent film you’ve got lots of waving of hands and people saying things to each other, and then finally a card comes up that just says, ’Yes, mother.’ And you’re like, ’After all that?!’ So the talkie version answers a lot of your questions, but the script stays very true to the story. It’s like what you think they would have said in the original film."

Jones plays Cesare in the movie (originally played by Conrad Veidt), and the actor does admit to feeling a bit overwhelmed when he first took on the role. Just as Abe Sapien and the Silver Surfer were much-loved characters prior to his tackling them, Cesare is loved by classic horror film purists. The "’Oh, that sucks’ potential," as Jones calls it, is intimidating, but he hopes that fans will watch the film with an open mind.

"Being able to play Cesare for me was such a treat because there’s another film icon, Cesare the somnambulist, one of the first monster-type characters on film, before Frankenstein, before the Mummy," he says. "It’s like he was this scary guy, but what I liked about him so much was not that he was a scary icon, but that he was another reluctant bad guy. He didn’t know he was bad. He was asleep and being told what to do by this evil Dr. Caligari, going on his killing sprees and whatnot, so I found him sort of sympathetic. Playing with this character doing evil deeds but with such a heart... it was such a fun character to plow into. I hope we pulled it off."