Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933)

Poster of the Week!--A surreal and oddly erotic advertisement for the 1933 color horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum. It wasn't the first full length color horror feature. That honor goes to Doctor X, a kissing cousin of sorts to Wax Museum, which had the same director (journeyman and Spielberg fave Michael Curtiz) and the same stars (classic heavy Lionel Atwill and beautiful and plucky Fay Wray). The copy on the poster resembles surrealist verse badly translated: "Images of wax that throbbed with human passion! / Almost Woman! / What do they lack?"
You may find screen grabs of this early example of Technicolor (2-color version) from a DVD review of Warner's House of Wax and Mystery of the Wax Museum on Horror Talk, at an extensive collection of stills and screengrabs from the Fay Wray site (complete with images from Doctor X and Wray's other WB horror film that she again co-starred with Lionel Atwll, the monochromatic The Vampire Bat, and at a blog concentrating on pre-code Hollywood films, Trouble in Paradise (nice!). If you're in the mood for reading and not looking at pictures, you can read the script for Wax Museum here.
It goes without saying: click on the image on the left for a much larger version. 474 K