Waxworks

• Emil Jannings, Conrad Veidt, and Werner Krauss each play just one of the three wax figures — Jannings is Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Veidt is Ivan the Terrible, and Krauss is Jack the Ripper — not, as sometimes misremembered, a single actor playing all three.
• Werner Krauss, who'd starred as the title character in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), plays the Ripper here; British prints renamed the character 'Spring-Heeled Jack' so as not to depict a real-life mass murderer, appeasing the British Board of Film Censors.
• The wax museum proprietor and his daughter Eva — the poet's real-world love interest — are played by John Gottowt and Olga Belajeff, not by any of the three story-figure actors.
• A planned fourth story, about the outlaw Rinaldo Rinaldini, was scrapped when the production ran short on time and money; the cut also compressed the Jack the Ripper segment into a nightmarish montage built from layered double exposures rather than a full story.
• Director Paul Leni came up as a theatrical set designer in Berlin, working under Max Reinhardt, before moving into film, and served as his own art director on Waxworks — giving the film's stylized, distorted sets (especially the Baghdad segment, often compared to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) his personal design stamp.

The entire narrative is a dying hallucination of the poet, poisoned by the fumes of the melting wax, with each story representing a stage of his deteriorating mind.

The wax figures symbolize the inescapable weight of history, suggesting that the atrocities of tyrants like Ivan and Jack are cyclical traps that inevitably consume the innocent.

The showman represents a cruel director-God, manipulating the poet's fate just as a filmmaker controls actors, turning the creative process into a life-or-death struggle.

A young, nameless poet takes a job from a small-town wax museum proprietor: invent lurid backstories for three of his figures — Caliph Harun al-Rashid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper — to pull in a paying crowd. Flirting with the proprietor's daughter Eva, who inspires every tale he writes, the poet gets swallowed by his own fiction. In the Baghdad story he casts himself as a baker married to a version of Eva and doomed by the Caliph's temper; in the Russian story he's a nobleman caught in Ivan's paranoid court. When the final, half-finished Ripper tale bleeds into "reality," the wax figure comes to life and stalks the poet and Eva through the museum's crooked halls — until he wakes to find the whole nightmare was a dream. Paul Leni turns a hack writing gig into a fever dream, using distorted, Caligari-adjacent expressionist sets to blur the line between the stories on the page and the man writing them.