“The Mystery of the Wax Museum" is a cult classic. Ivan Igor (that’s “eye-gore") is a sculptor from middle Europe who has chosen to work in wax  so much more skin-like than stone. It’s that famous London of the 1890’s -- Jack the Ripper time -- with Hansom cabs and dangers lurking in shadows. Igor is theatrically handsome and a madman; first  because he is oblivious to money; but more that he loves his creations  really loves them  and especially his Marie Antionette. When his business partner plans to torch the studio to collect insurance  Igor grapples with him and touches off a blaze that incinerates his creations and cripples himself.

It's now 1933 as Igor opens his museum in New York City. We feel the contrast between the New Years Eve merry makers on the street and the artist’s reserve and steely devotion to his craft. There’s been a suicide of a beautiful young socialite  and next you know we’re in the city morgue and a mysterious cloaked figure is lowering her corpse out the window. We get a glimpse of the figure  and his face is horrifying  his body bent  but preternaturally powerful. The socialite will be reborn as a wax-coated figure from Europe’s glamorous history.

Horror is never any good without serving up beautiful young women to the beast. First  there’s Faye Wray  the screaming goddess from “King Kong." Here she’s tastefully clothed and wonderfully refined  and a perfect candidate to become a waxen Antionette. Igor is astonished at the sight of her. We see her in close-up  and she’s uncertain and vulnerable  as a victim should be.

Igor is confined to a wheelchair  his clever hands damaged by the fire years ago. His squadron of assistants includes arty types  but also brutes -- my favorite a mumbling deaf-mute  intent on ravishing the goddess. Igor retains his 19th C. matinee idol profile  deep cultured voice  and distinguished manners. When at last  he grabs Faye Wray  she shatters his mask  and we see the monstrous disfigured face beneath. And boy does she scream as Igor straps her helpless form onto an operating table  right below the device about to pour molten wax and encase her beauty forever.

The film is brilliant (Michael Curtez  director of “Casablanca"). It’s in peculiar color  a red-blue Technicolor process that shades everything in astonishing vibrancy. The design of the basement laboratory (you know how to pronounce it) is elaborate and fanciful  complete with a vast electrical power board and a huge vat of bubbling wax  circular stairs  and secret doorways flying open and shut.

Into our jolly New Years’ gaiety and American innocence Old Europe erupts with its sacred values and uncanny craftsmanship. Old Europe asserts the privilege of superior persons to murder and  courteous and rapacious  to take our women. The danger comes with ominous accents and brutal ways disguised by handsome art and gracious manners. Underneath that smooth exterior lives a monster  as hideous and powerful as we can dream it.

“The Most Dangerous Game" (1932) is a horror/adventure film  starring Joel McCrae  Fay Wray  and Leslie Banks as the maniacal villain. It has all the lurid appeal of the Saturday afternoon serials of my childhood. Like all such juvenile excesses  “Game" has a deep target  the primal mind that treasures excessive images and appeals to pre-cultural memory.

We begin on a splendid yacht  with wealthy gentlemen  sipping scotch. The ship’s captain observes the channel markers are out of place and warns his well-tailored passengers of their danger in shark-infested waters with keel-tearing reefs. As in the Crash  the masters of things disregard warnings and end up feeding the sharks. Only big-game hunter “Bob" Rainsford  a mid-westerner and regular guy (McCrae) survives  tossed onto the tropical beach of a lush and mysterious island.

What’s there but a fantastical stone fortress with vast inner dimensions  steep staircases  and deep dungeons. Count Zaroff (Banks)  a courtly and intense Russian aristocrat  is master here. His helpers include Ivan  a massive mute Muzhik  a deadly Tartar adept at the curved bow  and Ahmed  a wily knife-wielding Arab.

Already Zaroff’s guests from their own shipwreck are the Trowbridges -- he a polished drunkard and his sister (Wray) a lovely Bryn Mawr girl  agile and alluring. Along the staircase is a huge tapestry depicting the Rape of the Sabine Women by lust-crazed centaurs  just in case you wanted to get any ideas.

Bob is a hunter  and so is the Count  who ignites at the chance of matching skills with his famous guest  in a hunt  where “dangerous game" means not the contest but the prey. As Zaroff intones  gazing lustfully at Eve Trowbridge  “the greatest eggstozee is to enjoy ze voman ahvter the keell."

A visit to Zaroff’s dungeon underscores the danger. Nearby European elegance awaits monstrous perversity. Massive headaches torment the count to madness. His dungeon is a torture chamber and a macabre museum with the heads of his human victims on display. Faye Wray  shocked by a severed head rising in its vessel to meet her gaze  does what Faye Wray does best.

The hunt is astonishing. McCrae sets brilliant traps for Zaroff in the dense jungle  foggy swamp  amidst turbulent waterfalls. Zaroff spots each of the deadly obstacles  and with Tartar bow  high-powered rifle  and a team of fierce hunting dogs descends upon McCrae and Wray  as her clothing slowly tears away during the jungle chase.

The pursuit is thrilling. Through foliage and mist  the camera creates a clear and open central circle to rivet our view. We peer out at things  working to form coherent images  as frantic action rushes by. The music follows Wagner’s logic of a simple theme -- here in unrelenting minor mode -- varied for emotion as the orchestra plays at times tenderly and  at others  madly into the B&W dream-work.

These horror films strike deep into primal thoughts and lay the groundwork for imagining the world. In Europe’s Dark Ages hand-rendered texts depicted in the margins nightmare images of dog-men  monster figures from Eurasia  ready to prey upon Europeans. In our own time  we good decent Americans still face this threat from monsters  savagely nipping at our heels and lusting for our women and  some say  our freedom.

“Dr.Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" (1931) is based on R. L. Stevenson’s story of a scientist’s efforts to separate the moral soul from the impulsive animal in us. Mamoulian’s film is famous for its effects  especially the remarkable transformation from man to monster  and the extraordinary performances of March and Hopkins. March won the Academy’s Best Actor  unusual for work in a horror film.

It opens with disembodied hands playing a Bach organ piece  random off-centered images  and then the slow forming of Dr. Jekyll’s reflection in a gilded mirror. He’s a handsome Victorian gentleman  a man of wealth and respectability. There is  however  something odd in the uncertainty as he regards his reflection.

He's been lecturing that day on his bold theory of the two souls that make up our psyche and the possibility of separating the two and erasing the vicious and primitive from our being. Later in the day  he has completed his work in surgery  coming to the aid of an aged and impoverished woman and a child no other surgeon was sufficiently skilled to cure. He is off to a gala gathering at the home of his intended  at the end of a day at the height of his genius -- a philosopher  a humanitarian  with the highest skills of his craft.

On his way he notices a woman brutalized on London’s rough streets  rescues her  and carries her to her rooms. Ivy Pierson (Hopkins) is a music-hall performer and a lovely if squalid temptress. She bids Jekyll look her over  loosening her bodice and removing her garters. There follow suggestive moments censors at the time removed. The good doctor restrains himself  but the images trouble him as later in a lush garden he pledges his love to his chaste bride-to-be.

Returning to his laboratory  Jekyll pursues his research  quaffing a bubbling potion to separate his two souls. In a triumph of early film illusion  we watch face-on as Jekyll becomes Hyde  an evolutionary reversion to something simian and vicious. He revels in his heightened energy and athletic force and returns to Ivy’s apartment for an orgy of domination. When Hyde begins reappearing at will and without the potion  Jekyll becomes a pitiable creature who must be destroyed.

“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" is set in Victorian London  with its strict social class distinctions. The two psyches are also distinct social orders  one of refinement -- where sober people learn to hang up on nature’s call -- the other devoted to the drunkenness and gross mating of the poor.

Mamoulian’s film dramatizes the two souls. Ivy’s sexual availability and submission intoxicate Jekyll  while the inhibitions dictated by the social order provoke his fury. On the one hand there’s the delicate waltz in the grand drawing room with pale poetry in the moonlit garden; on the other is the abandonment to wickedness in his doxy’s shabby bedroom.

Stevenson’s tale caught the Victorian tension -- the age of Jack the Ripper  the pornography of My Secret Life  and the swank bordellos and dangerous street trade set against high-minded rectitude of the age. In post-Crash America  these images of tormented souls  haunted after a decade of crazed abandon  had their own special horror. More broadly  closely administered societies invite multiple souls rebelling against restraints of order and good sense. The myth bearing the message is irresistible.