Waxworks

Paul Leni's delicious anthology film — a key bridge between German Expressionism and Hollywood horror — frames three tales within a carnival wax museum. A young poet is hired to write backstories for three wax figures: the caliph Harun al-Rashid (played by a scene-stealing Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (a chilling Conrad Veidt), and Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss in a nightmarish cameo). Each segment has its own visual style, from the lush Arabian Nights fantasy of the first to the paranoid corridors of the second to the hallucinatory Expressionist terror of the third, which collapses the boundary between storytelling and madness. Leni's dazzling visual imagination here earned him a ticket to Hollywood, where he would direct The Cat and the Canary and help invent the haunted house genre.

John Gottowt

Owner of the Waxworks