House of Wax (

1953

)

Every couple of decades Hollywood decides to try and get audiences to wear a pair of goofy-looking glasses and pay an extra couple of bucks to see their movies in 3D. Each time this phenomenon occurs, it is horror movies that try to cash in on the fade most shamelessly. In the latest 3D fad the mantle fell to films like Saw: The Final Chapter (2010) and Piranha 3D (2010). Both exemplars were plainly mercenary in their motivations, the latter being an exploitation film promising big 3D breasts (I have seen the movie alternatively titled Piranha 3-DD), while the former trying to wring one last paycheck out of a threadbare intellectual property. The films of the 1980s 3D boom were equally excitable, being made up mostly of 3rd entries in series that would have been better served by stopping at one, most notably Jaws 3-D (1983) and Friday the 13th: Part III (1982). Compared to this dreck, the 1950s 3D horror movies were masterpieces (with one genuine masterpiece, Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), among them). The difference was that in the 1950s, filmmakers genuinely believed they had found a bold new technology for telling stories. Hell, even a director of immense stature, Alfred Hitchcock, was onboard for the initial round of 3D nonsense, directing a full-length feature, Dial M for Murder (1953), in 3D. The theory behind 3D enhancing movies hadn’t yet been shown to be bunk, so filmmakers were going into the enterprise in good faith.

In theory, horror movies had the most to benefit from the new technology. Horror films have always strived to collapse the barrier between their audience and the events on screen and make the fantastic terror all the more impactful. This is why to this day, horror movies like to open with the disclaimer “Based on True Events” even when the story itself has only a passing similarity to reality. To have monsters literally leap out of the screen at the audience seems to be the most direct and obvious way of collapsing this barrier. No film of the 1950s 3D phase seemed more confident in this than House of Wax, which gleefully bombarded the audience with all sorts of detritus aimed at the camera. There’s even a scene where an obnoxious carnival barker, armed with a paddleball, bats it playfully at the audience and tells the “gentleman” with the popcorn to watch out. The thing that House of Wax didn’t realize is that this is all intolerably goofy, and while I’m sure first-run audiences of the film were suitably entertained, I seriously doubt that any of them were terrified (excluding perhaps the very small children in the Saturday morning matinee that is).

Our story begins with a relatively sane Vincent Price playing Professor Henry Jarrod, who is the chief sculptor and proprietor of a wax museum in 19th century New York City. I say relatively sane, as he has a propensity to talk to the statues in his wax museum as if they were real people. It’s an odd quirk sure, but one that is to be expected in a serious artist. Jarrod is doing decent business with his museum, but he’d do a lot better if he made a few concessions to the macabre and put in a “Chamber of Horrors” like his business partner Mathew Burke constantly nags him to do. Indeed, Burke is so fed up with Jarrod’s artistic temperament and indifference to making money that he wants out of his investment. Fortunately for both men, the rich art critic Sidney Wallace visits the museum that night, Jarrod hopes he can get Wallace to agree to take Burke’s place. After a brief tour of the museum where Wallace raves endlessly about the wax sculptures Jarrod has on display (I know willing suspension of disbelief, but none of the statues seem particularly impressive), Wallace is all but sold. The only problem is he is off to Egypt for the next three months, and any business transactions will have to wait until he gets back. Jarrod is happy enough with the arrangement but Burke doesn’t have three months to spare, he needs the money now for an important business venture. So Burke, being the reasonable sort he is, knocks the stuffing out of Jarrod and burns down the wax museum for the insurance. Burke assures us that “wax is highly inflammable” so the whole museum will go up like a powder keg. Burke is correct that wax is inflammable, but is apparently confused about what the word means. So, it should come as no surprise that Jerrod escapes the blaze, albeit with a few hideous deformities. The fire scene is spectacular with far more and bigger flames than I figured would be possible in such a small feature. In this case, I was correct. Originally, the plan was a much smaller fire but the crew lost control of the blaze and director Andre De Toth, refused to stop filming, as the melting wax statues were too expensive/difficult to replace. Now that's a commitment to bringing in a movie on time and under budget, albeit to a slightly psychotic degree.

Jarrod drops off the map for a time; once everyone is confident that he died in the fire that destroyed his museum, he strikes. Dressing up as a homicidal Zorro knock-off, Jarrod enacts his revenge on Burke by strangling him and then hanging him in an elevator shaft to make it look like suicide. With vengeance served, Jarrod can go back to his calling, making wax sculptures. The only problem is that his hands have been rendered all but useless by the fire and he can only create through the help of his two assistants, a drunken criminal named Leon and a deaf-mute named Igor (played by a young Charles Bronson of all people!). But Jarrod is not content with playing mentor to a rogue’s gallery of sinister artists; he still longs to create his own art. So, he does the reasonable thing and begins abducting young women, coating them in wax, and putting them on display. How this works is beyond me, is being sealed in wax enough to keep a corpse from decaying? I’d search for an answer but I don’t want to wind up on any more government watch lists. Jarrod’s first unwilling model is Burke’s girlfriend, Cathy Gray. He kills her and stealing her body from the morgue to use as his Joan of Arc. In the process, he also meets Gray’s friend, Sue Allen and decided that she would make a fine Marie Antoinette. Sue is a capable young woman though, and she’s gradually putting the pieces together about Jarrod’s whole macabre enterprise.

For such a low budget film (De Toth filmed the movie is half the allotted time and spent little more than a 3rd of the production budget, earning him the accolades of Jack Warner himself) House of Wax looks great. The sets are all these gorgeous sound stages, which are particularly impressive for the exterior shots on the gas-lite streets of Old New York. Price’s make-up is grotesque, particularly in the scene where his wax mask is shattered and his frightful visage revealed. That said, the filmmakers missed an opportunity by having Price’s mask be a fully articulate stand-in. It would have been much more frightening had there been something subtly wrong with his appearance and expression (if his work in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) is any indication, Price was certainly capable of such a performance). The stunt work doubtlessly violated a few safety regulations (see pretty much every shot in the mismanaged fire scene) but is nonetheless thrilling. Having the whole thing shot in glorious Technicolor makes the film all the more enjoyable, as most contemporary exploitation movies were limited to black and white.

The thing most likely to turn off modern viewers about House of Wax is the thing that I found most enjoyable: The goofy half-comedic tone. The above-mentioned scene with the paddleball wielding carnival barker is only the most openly absurd. This is a film that will interrupt its proceedings to make time for a can-can dance and name the disabled henchman after the more famous one from Son of Frankenstein (1939). It even, for reasons I cannot even begin to fathom for a 90-minute movie, has an intermission; for god's sake, this isn't Gone with the Wind (1939) we're talking about here. It sure as hell isn’t scary, which should be a damning condemnation of a horror movie, Yet I don’t find myself disliking House of Wax any less for failing so completely at it’s stated mission. The whole thing is just too bright, too colorful, and obviously having too much fun to warrant many complaints. It’s the kind of horror that seems directed primarily at children, the kind where there are scary monsters but nothing too terrible can happen (at least not to characters we genuinely like). More than anything it reminds me of an unusually gruesome episode of Scooby-Doo, or an unusually tame issue of the Detective Conan anime.

Cinema was, at this point in history, littered with scientists of questionable sanity. In the 1940s and 1950s, mad scientists were probably the single laziest choice for horror movie antagonists, beating out vampires and aliens handily. But this film makes me wonder, why don’t we see more mad artists? Artists are just as likely as scientists to be anti-social goons laboring long hours on endeavors that the general public regards as a waste of time and effort. What’s more, artists are even more likely to be riddled with debilitating mental sickness than their scientific counterparts (certain disciplines seem to suffer from it worse than others, a poet is more likely to be mad than say a furniture designer). But for the life of me, aside from today’s movie, the original it was based on, and the remake from 2005 I can only think of a couple of Mad Artists horror movies: Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Blind Beast (1969). Those can’t be the only examples of the subgenre, but it will take a bit of research to dredge up anymore.

This film marks a major turning point in Vincent Price’s career: This was his first starring role in a horror movie. Believe it or not, before 1953 he was mostly known for small parts in noir movies like Laura (1944) and Leave Her to Heaven (1945). The absurdity of goofy 1950s horror movies suited Price’s menace as well as his innate humor. He was the perfect actor for that age of horror film, often as ridiculous as the movies he appeared in. After House of Wax, he would appear in another goofy, 3D horror movie: The Mad Magician (1954). From there he would partner with two of the biggest figures in mid-century horror, William Castle and Roger Corman, to produce some of the most lasting testaments to the time and genre. For this reason alone I would have a soft spot for House of Wax, even if it were far more absurd and less entertaining than it really is.