The Proto-Horror-Comedy: Waxworks

Abstract

Westerdale’s chapter revisits the place of Waxworks within the canon of expressionist cinema emerging from Germany in the early years of the Weimar Republic. Waxworks is among a key group of films, which also includes Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Carl Boese’s The Golem (1920), Fritz Lang’s Destiny (1921), F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), that frequently functions as metonymic shorthand for early Weimar cinema as a whole. As this essay argues, however, Waxworks is also significant for its contributions as a comedy. Though the episodes with Ivan the Terrible and Jack the Ripper are predictably grim, the film’s longest sequence presents a Baghdad burlesque in which Emil Jannings’ lecherous caliph Harun al-Rashid is more clown than villain. Such an episode sits uneasily in the “historical imaginary” (to borrow Thomas Elsaesser’s term) that continues to dominate discussions of early Weimar film.