Each time you move to a new level of the museum, you enter a brightly lit area.
Most figures however are a combination of wax and fiberglass or wood.
Well, Madame Tussaud got her start taking death masks of the decapitated heads during the French Revolution. In London, she put wax representations of these masks on display. There was a horror and gruesomeness about the event that people felt a need to recreate. A chamber of horrors tradition developed partly as a history of torture. People liked to be scared.