Plot
In New York City during the early 1900s, talented sculptor Professor Henry Jarrod runs a wax museum that features historical figures who have met grisly ends. His business partner, Matthew Burke, wants to end their partnership due to Jarrod's refusal to make sensational exhibits, such as those that draw crowds to their competitors. Wealthy art critic Sidney Wallace offers to buy out Burke on his return from Egypt in three months. Impatient, Burke sets fire to the museum for the insurance money; Jarrod attempts to stop him, but is overpowered and left for dead.
After Burke receives the insurance money, a disfigured man in a cloak strangles him and stages the murder as a suicide. He murders Burke's fiancée, Cathy Gray, but is interrupted by her roommate, Sue Allen, before he can arrange the scene. She runs to her friend Scott Andrews' home, while the murderer steals Cathy's body from the morgue.
Wallace meets Jarrod who survived the fire, now wheelchair-bound and unable to sculpt with his crippled hands. Jarrod asks Wallace to invest in his new wax museum, featuring statues made by his assistants, deaf-mute Igor and alcoholic Leon Averill. He concedes to popular taste by including a chamber of horrors showcasing acts of violence, including Burke's apparent suicide.
Attending the museum's grand re-opening with Scott, Sue is troubled by the resemblance of the Joan of Arc wax figure to Cathy; Jarrod claims he based the figure on newspaper photos of her. He hires Scott as an assistant and asks Sue to model for a Marie Antoinette figure, as she resembles his earlier one. Sue tells Detective Lieutenant Tom Brennan that the Joan of Arc figure shares a distinctive ear piercing with Cathy, which she does not believe would be discernible from a newspaper photo, and agrees to investigate. Sergeant Jim Shane recognizes Averill as the parole-breaking Carl Hendricks and takes him in after finding a missing attorney's pocket watch in his possession.
Sue arrives at the museum after hours to meet Scott, but Jarrod had sent him on an errand when he heard she was coming, and soon discovers Cathy's corpse within the Joan of Arc figure. Jarrod, watching, gets up from his wheelchair, revealing he can walk. Sue strikes him, breaking a wax-made mask concealing his disfigured face identifying him as the murderer, and faints as Jarrod abducts her.
Scott returns and is subdued by Igor. The police draw the truth out of a guilt-ridden Averill – Jarrod was driven mad by his previous museum's destruction and his new wax figures are the wax-coated corpses of his victims. They arrive at the museum just in time to stop Igor from decapitating Scott with an exhibit's guillotine. Jarrod is knocked into a vat of hot wax and killed as Sue is saved.
