Finally, as the writer begins to succumb to fatigue after a long night’s work, the wax figure of Spring-Heeled Jack (or Jack the Ripper, in the original German either way, he’s played by Werner Krauss) comes to life and chases the other characters around a version of reality that holds its own mind-bending secrets. Caligari star Conrad Veidt) spreads his poisonous brand of cruelty among his subjects, including wrecking the wedding of characters again played by Dieterle and Belajeff. Next, we follow along as Ivan the Terrible ( Dr. No matter it’s a flaw that the writer incorporates into an energetic tale about a baker (Dieterle), his alluring wife (Belajeff), and the lascivious ruler who pursues her.
Hungry for greater publicity, the proprietor of a wax museum and his enthusiastic daughter (Olga Belajeff) hire a writer (Wilhelm Dieterle, who soon left Germany for Hollywood and made his name as a director, with a filmography that included 1939’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame) to let his imagination run wild and come up with “startling tales” to bolster three of their history-inspired figures.įirst up is the rotund, gloriously mustachioed Harun al-Raschid, the Caliph of Baghdad (Emil Jannings), who has seemingly stepped straight out of Arabian Nights, except he’s missing an arm. Anthology movies keep the pace moving, which for horror fans ideally means a higher frequency of scares, as well as a variety of monsters, styles, and moods, depending on the contents of each segment.Īs the title suggests, Waxworks begins amid the chaos of a fun fair, a ghoulish environment that’s already enough to put anyone on edge-even without the presence of wax figures so lifelike they’re obviously actors holding very, very still for Leni to get the shot. Romero-Stephen King collaboration Creepshow, 1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie, and the more recent V/H/S and ABCs of Death films. After this early example of the format, the horror genre has since returned to it again and again, with examples as varied as Mario Bava’s 1963 Black Sabbath, 1982’s George A. Waxworks ( Das Wachsfigurenkabinett) was written by Nosferatu screenwriter Henrik Galeen and has the added curiosity of being an anthology film, with a frame story that anchors and occasionally bleeds into the chapters that follow. Not exactly a horror movie, it has some undeniably eerie elements.
But there’s a strong case for adding Paul Leni’s carnival of unease Waxworks to that list. Caligari and Nosferatu are still so popular, especially around Halloween. With their sinister killers, hazy nightmares, and pointy-fingered vampires, all wrapped up in the menacing mise-en-scène that came to define German Expressionism, it’s no wonder that films like The Cabinet of Dr.
Horror movies, or at least their progenitors, have been haunting audiences since the silent era, and the best ones can still make us shriek a hundred years later.
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