A Wax Museum…of Naked, Sickly, & Grotesque Bodies

Most of us are familiar with Madame Toussaud’s wax museums, the places where we can see eerily-lifelike wax casts of our favorite celebrities. Now, you can take the same idea and increase the creepy-factor by 100 or so.

In the Morbid Anatomy Museum’s House of Wax: Anatomical, Pathological & Ethnographic Waxworks from Castan’s Panopticum, Berlin, 1869–1922, you’ll see severed heads, intestines and an unborn fetus spilling out of a woman’s body, a child suffering from diphtheria, and much, much more.

The whole thing is curated by onetime cohost of TV’s “Oddities” Ryan Matthew Cohn in conjunction with Alamo Drafthouse.

But why?

According to an interview with Drafthouse, “The models were originally displayed in a “panopticon” — essentially, that’s an olden-day penny museum filled with oddities and freakish artifacts bearing certain cultural, scientific and medical pretenses.”

“These things that we now read as kind of sexual… I don’t think they read that way at the time, I think they were more thought provoking,”Morbid Anatomy’s owner Joanna Ebenstein told HuffPost.

See for yourself!