The Student of Prague

• Hanns Heinz Ewers wrote the screenplay (director credit belongs to Stellan Rye, not Ewers). Ewers later joined the Nazi Party in 1931, but the party expelled him by 1934 over a sympathetically written Jewish character in his fiction and his own personal life — his books were banned that same year.
• The mirror-double effect came from cinematographer Guido Seeber's carefully choreographed double exposure: Wegener walked out of frame as an identically dressed double walked in, and the footage was re-exposed to blend the two takes into one seamless shot.
• It's widely regarded as the first German 'art film' (Autorenfilm) — an auteur-driven prestige production conceived by star Paul Wegener with director Rye, writer Ewers, and cinematographer Seeber, notable for leaning on pure film craft rather than adapting a famous literary work.
• Composer Josef Weiss wrote an original score performed live at the film's August 1913 Berlin premiere. It wasn't the first film score ever written — Camille Saint-Saëns beat it by five years with his 1908 score for The Assassination of the Duke of Guise — but it's credited as the first score composed specifically for a German film.
• Though often called the first true doppelgänger film and Germany's first horror picture, it predates the Expressionist movement kicked off by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by seven years and looks nothing like it — naturalistic Gothic staging, not distorted sets.

The double isn't Baldwin's soul at all — it's the version of himself he's been performing for high society. Scapinelli doesn't steal anything; he just forces Baldwin to confront the gap between his honest poverty and his social-climbing fraud. The mirror scene is less supernatural theft than identity crisis made literal.

Scapinelli functions as Baldwin's unacknowledged shadow-self rather than an external demon. Every act the double commits — the romantic sabotage, the killing — reflects impulses Baldwin already harbored but refused to own. The pact is Baldwin giving himself permission to be his worst self.

The final confrontation in Baldwin's own room reads as his final exam, not his damnation. He doesn't lose to the double — when he finally fires the pistol, he's integrating the split self by destroying it, even though it costs him his own life. His collapse there is completion, not defeat: the student of Prague has graduated.

Baldwin, a broke and arrogant student in 19th-century Prague, cuts a deal with the sinister Scapinelli: a fortune in gold for anything found in his shabby room. Baldwin figures he owns nothing worth taking — until Scapinelli reaches into the mirror and pulls out his own reflection, walking it out the door as a living double. Flush with cash, Baldwin chases Countess Margit, a noblewoman above his station, while a lovestruck local girl named Lyduschka watches from the shadows and grows jealous. The doppelgänger starts wrecking everything: haunting the lovers through Prague's alleys and a graveyard tryst, then killing the Countess's fiancé in a duel that was supposed to be Baldwin's fight. When the double shows up one last time in Baldwin's own room, he finally fires a pistol at it — and drops dead himself, the two of them bound to the same fate. Paul Wegener's gaunt, theatrical double performance anchors what's widely cited as the first true doppelgänger film, and German cinema's first horror picture.