Denzel Washington as Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet)

I've been doing some casting for a remake of the Universal Monsters franchise, and yes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a unrelated German horror film but it's in the public domain and would be an absolutely wonderful addition for a remake of the franchise. Dr. Caligari is a successful German psychiatrist who is the director of an asylum. After becoming obsessed with an enlightenment era mystic who committed murders using a hypnotized sleepwalker decides he's going to go and do the same thing himself. Caligari takes to the carnival circuit with his hypnotized killer Cesare who he let's loose on the public. Caligari is a genius the quintessential mad scientist, but he has great feelings of inadequacy when compared to the original mystic Caligari. He is of course also insane. Denzel Washington is a wonderful and very accomplished actor known for an incredible number of roles from Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing to Frack Lucas in American Gangster to Eli in The Book of Eli. Denzel has done villain roles before most notably Alonzo Harris in Training Day, and he's done plenty of very smart very calculating characters over the course of his career, now that's he's a little older I can totally see him pulling off an american version of Caligari.