Its stories are linked by a plot thread about a writer (William Dieterle) who accepts a job from a waxworks proprietor to write a series of stories about the exhibits of Caliph of Baghdad (Emil Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt) and Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss) in order to boost business.
A young nameless poet (Dieterle) enters a wax museum where the proprietor works in the company of his daughter Eva (Olga Belajeff [de]).
The proprietor hires the poet to write a back-story for his wax models of Harun al-Rashid (Jannings), Ivan the Terrible (Veidt), and Jack the Ripper (Krauss) in order to draw an audience to the museum.
Smoke from Assad's bakery covers the front of the palace, where Al-Rashid loses a game of chess, leading him to want the head of the baker.
(40 minutes) The second episode, treated in a slower and more somber vein, deals with the Czar of Russia, Ivan the Terrible, whom the poet describes as making 'cities into cemeteries'.
There, the nobleman is killed with an arrow, and his daughter (Eva) and her bridegroom (the poet) are in shock as Ivan takes over their festivities, eventually absconding with her and holding the groom in his torture chamber.
(37 minutes) After the poet finishes the last two stories, he wakes up to find that the wax model of Jack the Ripper has come to life (the character’s name was changed to that of Victorian urban-legend character Spring-heeled Jack in British prints to pass the British Board of Film Censors, who felt referring to and depicting a real mass murderer was offensive).
The Poet and the girl flee but find that they can't escape Jack through the dark, twisted halls of the museum.
As Jack draws close enough, multiple versions of him appear, and as his knife begins to slash, it provokes the poet to wake up to realize that the last experience was a dream.
[2] The version seen in issues circulated today follow Galeen's original script which Leni had organized the film by a month after the German premiere.
[8] A 2019 restoration undertaken by the Deutsche Kinemathek, Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna and L’Immagine Ritrovata was released on Blu-ray in November 2020.