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.

One night, he gives a private tour to a friend, Dr. Rasmussen, and an art critic, Mr. Galatalin, showing them statues of Joan of Arc, Voltaire, and his favorite, Marie Antoinette.

Impressed, Galatalin offers to submit Igor's work to the Royal Academy after he returns from a trip to Egypt.

Reporter Florence Dempsey, on the verge of being fired by her impatient editor, Jim, for not bringing in any worthwhile news, gets a tip that George Winton, the son of a powerful industrialist, is being held in connection with the death of his model ex-girlfriend, Joan Gale.

Charlotte strikes Igor's face and breaks through a wax mask to his scarred true visage underneath, revealing he is the monstrous bodysnatcher.

[1] 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.

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.

[7] Mordaunt Hall of The New York Times praised the comic performances of Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh, but found the overall film "too ghastly for comfort", writing: "It is all very well in its way to have a mad scientist performing operations in well-told stories, but when a melodrama depends upon the glimpses of covered bodies in a morgue and the stealing of some of them by an insane modeler in wax, it is going too far.

After the Warner library was sold as a package to Associated Artists Productions for television syndication in the late 1950s,[8] Mystery of the Wax Museum, though it remained on the sales list, was never broadcast, because the negative vaults did not have a preprint to service it.

[10] The American Film Institute made a new negative, which director of photography Ray Rennahan told historian Richard Koszarski looked so dismal he walked out of the screening room when it was shown to him.

United Artists made a low-contrast negative for TV prints, which lacked virtually all of the original color, and the film was released as part of UA's "Prime Time Showcase" television package in August 1972, which was first broadcast on the BBC in London before playing sixteen domestic TV markets.

In Washington D.C., Mystery of the Wax Museum played on WTOP's Saturday night classic film series "Cinema Club 9" in late 1972.

In New York City, it had its first airing in 1973 on WPIX-TV in a Sunday morning slot, cut by 15 minutes for commercials, before becoming a staple on the station's Saturday night Chiller Theater.

The Jack Warner nitrate print of the film resides at UCLA, which also holds a French workprint in the PHI collection.

Uncovered by a Los Angeles collector in the early 2000s, the workprint has indifferent, pallid-plus-green color, French subtitles, and an English audio track, though some reels lack sound.

Other missing bits of audio were taken from other Warner Bros. films, including a line of Glenda Farrell's dialogue that was sourced from Life Begins (1932).