100th ANNIVERSARY SCREENING!
Silent Revue’s season dedicated to horror turns its attention to the era’s earliest instances of serial killers with our centenary celebration of WAXWORKS, featuring the first cinematic invocation of Jack the Ripper!
Co-directed by “Master of Horror” Paul Leni and the mysterious Leo Birinski, WAXWORKS is a tri-part story of jealousy, wrath and murder most foul. After a poet (future Hollywood director William Dieterle) accepts a job to write backstories for a wax museum’s star attractions, the ruthless lives of Caliph Harun al-Rashid (Emil Jannings), Russian Czar Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt), and Victorian terror Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss) come to life. Starring a trifecta of Weimar’s greatest, including a re-pairing of Dr. Caligari and his Somnambulist—Krauss and Veidt respectively—WAXWORKS is essential horror. A film that is cited frequently as inspiring the anthology subgenre, it also represents Leni’s final German feature before decamping for Universal Studios to direct THE CAT AND THE CANARY and THE MAN WHO LAUGHS. Truly German Expressionism at its finest and ever fascinating a century after it first premiered.
Live accompaniment by Jordan Klapman
Silent Revue is curated by Alicia Fletcher
Silent Revue is sponsored by Hollywood Suite