The only thing that truly could be called "horror" is the final sequence, which is so brief as to be hardly a story at all.
If you go in expecting horror you will be disappointed. The last story is hardly a story at all- a very brief nightmarish interlude in which the storyteller and the proprietor's daughter are menaced on the fairgrounds after-hours by the figure of "Jack the Ripper" (or "Springheel Jack"- the writers can't make up their minds. The middle story, that of Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt) is the story of the comeuppance of the sadistic and unhinged Czar, his own cruelty and untrustworthiness coming back to destroy him. The tales are, again, not what I'd call "horror." The tale of the Caliph is a sort of comedy, with the (grossly corpulent) Caliph (Emil Jannings) falling for the wife of a hapless baker (baker and wife played by Dieterle and Belajeff- they play important roles in each story). As the proprietor (John Gottowt)and his daughter (Olga Belajeff) watch eagerly, the storyteller (he isn't given a proper name- he's just "the storyteller") gets inspired when he sees that the waxwork of the Caliph Harun Al-Rashid has lost his arm. His job is to write stories about the wax figures, some backstory to excite the punters. It is indeed, however, an anthology film: A young writer (William Dieterle) accepts a job at a waxworks exhibition. I would not describe Waxworks as horror in the way I would unhesitatingly describe those films. Caligari or Nosferatu, for the obvious examples. Horror film certainly existed at that point in Germany: Witness The Cabinet of Dr. Well, that title is a tiny bit misleading. The film is often credited as "the first horror anthology," which was why I wanted to see it. I haven't seen any reviews here for the 1924 silent German film Waxworks, so I thought I'd provide one.
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