Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) Review | Fay Wray | 31 Days of Halloween Horror Movie #26 | Frumess

Mystery of the Wax Museum is a 1933 American pre-Code mystery-horror film directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Glenda Farrell, and Frank McHugh. It was produced and released by Warner Bros. and filmed in two-color Technicolor; Doctor X and Mystery of the Wax Museum were the last two dramatic fiction films made using this process.

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31 Days of Halloween is back on the Frumess channel. Every year since 2014? I watch a MINIMUM of 31 Halloween movies. Last year, I took it up a notch and did a video review for each thing I saw and this year I plan to attempt the same feat. It is NOT easy, and I may not finish… But I will attempt it.  Rules: I must watch one movie for each day of October. It’s ok to skip a day as long as I reach a minimum total of 31 movies by October 31st.

The film is based on an unpublished short story, "The Wax Works", by Charles S. Belden, who had also written a play called The Wax Museum, which was optioned by Charles Rogers, an independent producer. This had been discovered by Warner's copyright attorney, but the studio optioned the story from Belden for $1,000 before getting the attorney's report. Rogers dropped his option on the play when the co-author of a Broadway play with a similar plot threatened him with a lawsuit.  A follow-up to Warner's earlier horror film Doctor X (1932), Mystery involved many of the same cast and crew, including actors Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, Arthur Edmund Carewe, and Thomas Jackson; director Michael Curtiz; art director Anton Grot; and cameraman Ray Rennahan. The film also re-used Doctor X's opening theme music by Bernhard Kaun.

Mystery of the Wax Museum was the last of Warner's feature films under a 1931 contract with Technicolor, whose two-color system at the time combined separation photography printed with red and green dyes to create a color image with a reduced spectrum. As the novelty of color films began to wear off, Warner had noted a growing apathy, and even hostility, among critics and the public toward their Technicolor films since 1929, given the unreal hues and humdrum quality control, and this made the considerable additional expense seem less worthwhile. Warner had tried, without success, to get Technicolor to permit them to swap out their last feature-length commitment for a series of shorts, but after the studio violated the contract by filming Doctor X with an additional black-and-white unit—thereby permitting them to process B&W prints at their own lab and avoid paying Technicolor thousands of dollars—Technicolor refused. Consequently, Mystery of the Wax Museum was the last studio feature filmed in two-color Technicolor. Because the heat generated by the extremely bright lights required for the process could melt wax, many of the statues in the film were portrayed by actors, though some have said this was always the plan and was intended to add a life-like verisimilitude to the wax exhibits.

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