31 Days of Horror Movies - House of Wax (1953)

Meet Henry Jarrod [played by Vincent Price].  He’s a wax sculptor who runs a wax museum in New York.  His specialty is historical figures.  His business partner is a guy named Matthew Burke.  He wants more money, and he wants Jarrod to do more contemporary stuff, like what one would read from a newspaper.  Jarrod is an artist – he doesn’t want to stoop so low as to curry favor with the great unwashed for the sake of a buck.  Jarrod gave a tour of the museum for a local art critic.  The critic is so impressed with the place he offers to buy it from Jarrod and his partner.  Jarrod’s happy about it, but the critic can’t complete the sale until he completes a trip to Europe.  Burke can’t wait that long – he wants the money yesterday.  What does he do?  He does what any cash-hungry guy will do for instant money – he torches the place.  Jarrod was there when he did it.  So dedicated is he to his craft, Jarrod tries to save his wax creations in the fire, but he was unsuccessful.  Burke had poured kerosene on him, hoping he would die in the fire.  He didn’t die, but he did suffer significant injuries.  He was thought to have disappeared.  He did, but only for a little while.

Jarrod recovered and opened a new wax museum months later.  But he has difficulty doing the work himself.  His hands were “crippled” in the fire.  He has two assistants, one named Igor [Charles Bronson] and another named Leon Averill.  Why do lab assistants always have to be named Igor?  But I digress…Jarrod has this “new process” for making his wax sculptures.  His sculptures were so realistic, very “life-like.”  But unlike his previous museum, he bows to the public’s appetite for shock and horror.  Around the same time, people are dropping dead of mysterious circumstances.  In addition, the victims’ corpses disappear from the morgue.  Who might these people be?  For starters, Mr. Burke [the insurance fraud] supposedly “hanged” himself.  He was really murdered by some mysterious, cloaked guy who was disfigured.  This same mysterious killer then made it look like a suicide after the murder.  His “suicide” was depicted in the new museum.  Who else died?  Burke’s fiancée, Cathy Gray [played by the future Morticia Adams, Carolyn Jones]. 

Cathy had a friend named Sue Allen [Phyllis Kirk].  She visited the wax museum and noticed the Joan of Arc sculpture looked a lot like Cathy, even down to the pierced ears.  She asked Jarrod about it and he explained that Cathy indeed modeled for him.  Sue Allen didn’t buy the explanation.  She went back to the museum after hours and discovered the wax sculptures were really wax-covered corpses.  It was like Charlton Heston discovering that Soylent Green was made from people.  Jarrod catches her and reveals his secret to making wax sculptures.  And since Sue Allen knows the secret, she’s going to become an exhibit in the wax show.  Even more shocking to Sue Allen was when she peeled off Vincent Price’s face to reveal the hideously disfigured killer, who happened to look like Freddie Krueger.  But of course, Sue gets rescued, the new place burns down [who saw that one coming?], and Vincent Price dies in the end.  But really, this was a beginning for Vincent Price.  With this movie, he became a bonafide horror movie star.  Everybody has to start somewhere, and this is where his horror movie reputation starts.

House of Wax was filmed in 3-D, but the only real 3-D moments happen during the opening of Jarrod’s new wax museum.  Jarrod hired a guy with paddle balls on the end of a string, who kept hitting the balls right at the camera.  There are some can-can girls too. They kick a lot toward the camera.  That’s as much 3-D as you get in this movie.  But forget about the 3-D gimmick – this is a tale of madness and revenge, pure and simple.  But at least killing your enemies, covering them in wax [I wonder if this is where “getting waxed” became a euphemism for getting killed…], and putting them on display in your cascade of horrors is a unique approach.