An inheritance of horror:: the shadow of Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari in Salman!Rushdie's Shame

Setting off from the oft-recognised influence of film and the film industry upon Salman Rushdie's work, this article proposes to disclose a specific relationship between Shame, Rushdie's 1983 satirical novel, and Robert Wiene's 1920 German classic Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari. Both works evolve from the same main subject, insanity, which is suggested in the film by the extraordinary effects of twisted streets, over-hanging buildings and contorted spaces, and in the book by the vivid description of Sufiya's violent attacks. There can also be found an identical set of characters: a murderous somnambulist, a mad doctor, and a Beauty-like character roaming through a text pervaded by mystery, horror and fantasy. In reality, both works draw heavily on the workings of fairy tales and particularly on Beauty and the Beast and Sleeping Beauty. If Das Kabinett was able to make an impressive statement on post-war Germany, the horror conventions that it established are effectively still at work in a novel which revisits the context of a politically repressed Pakistan where mindless tyranny was the norm.