House of Wax

Mr. Pat

12 hours ago

4 min read

Today, I worked 11:00 PM - 7:00 AM. It's a shift I used to work every single day when I first started back in Toledo in 2012. My normal work schedule is 1:00 AM - 9:00 AM, and it's slightly better, I guess. I used to go to bed right when I got home, and wake up around five. I remember during the winter months, I'd go Monday through Friday without seeing the sun at all. When I left Channel 13, I told myself I'd never work mornings again. Whoops! Anyways, let's discuss...

House of Wax (1953)

This month I've spent watching more recent horror, and I've spent very little time on movies outside the 2010s and 2020s. After strolling through HBO Max, I figured now was the time to take a trip to the past, and I know... math, but it's crazy that 1953 was 73 years ago! Living through the turn of the century really screws with my perception of time. I never saw the remake that came out with Paris Hilton and Sam Winchester, but that release was opening night at the mall theater. I distinctly remember having to stand in there because the crowd was getting rowdy, and I was called a racial slur by someone in the crowd. Good times!

Another reason that I chose this movie is that it's been too long since I've seen a Vincent Price movie. Even in bad movies, Price is worth the PRICE of admission. See what I did there? So we fade up on Professor Henry Jarrod (Price) as he's working in his shop. He runs a moderately successful house of wax, but his partner isn't happy. He thinks the business could be much better if Jarrod embraces the macabre, but Jarrod strongly refuses; he is a brilliant sculptor and much prefers the beauty of history. From listening to him talk, he is either a bit of a showman or a bit insane when going over how he makes his creations, saying he and the statues talk to each other.

Thankfully, a bigwig is on his way to look at Jarrod's shop, and the hope is he'll buy out Jarrod's partner. The bigwig is very impressed and says he's going on a trip, but he'll be back in three months, and they'll talk then. Unfortunately, that's not good enough for the partner. He tells Jarrod that if they torch the building, insurance will pay out 25k-money. I went to the Google, and it turns out 25k-money in 1953 is worth around 313k-money today!

Naturally, Jarrod refuses, but the partner sets fire to the building anyway. The two fight, and despite having like six inches on him, Jarrod gets his ass beat twice in the scene. Despite that, everything going pm is really cool because the fire keeps growing, and because there are so many wax statues there, everything escalates very quickly. Too quickly, in fact, as the fire quickly got out of control in real life. The team couldn't control the flames, so it wasn't long before it was an inferno. Because the wax statues were expensive, the director didn't yell cut; he kept rolling, even as real firefighters started dousing the flames. It looks very cool, but it's crazy how things used to go in Hollywood back then. And that's not the only super dangerous thing actors had to deal with. I'll get into that later.

Jarrod is left for dead, and the partner eventually gets his money. Unfortunately for him, that very night a shadowy figure breaks into his home and strangles him, then sets up the murder to look like a suicide. A short time later, the man's girlfriend is attacked by the same person, except this time, there's a witness. Sue. He chases her, but she manages to escape. The movie then follows the police trying to track down the killer, and Jarrod re-emerging, with burnt hands, trying to get the man from the beginning to invest in his new wax house, this time embracing popular demand and including a chamber of horrors. Since he can't use his hands, he has a deaf-mute Igor, played by Charles Bronson in one of his early roles, and a drunk to work as his hands.

I liked it. Vincent Price is good in everything, and the cast does its best to keep up with him. It's always interesting to watch movies from this era and see how society thought of and treated women. The first time we see one of the women, she's being fitted into a corset and is telling her friend to make it tighter and tighter until she almost looks like an hourglass. It's crazy what women used to go through back then for fashion.

We knew Jarrod was a little crazy before the fire, but now he's lost it. He's taking the bodies of the recently deceased and turning them into wax figures to fill out his museum, and not all of them are dead at the time. It's extremely creepy knowing what happened to these people and seeing their bodies displayed like that.

I mentioned another dangerous stunt earlier. The main attraction of his enterprise is a wax figure of Marie Antoinette. Apparently, you can't have the doomed monarch without the guillotine. And to get rid of a particularly tenacious man, he has Igor set up in the beheading machine, only for him to be saved at the last second. The problem is, the blade was absolutely real. The actor refused, fought the director tooth and nail before he was fired. The studios intervened and demanded he be rehired. They did the stunt in a moderately safer manner, and he steadfastly refused to do another take. I swear, Hollywood back then was wild.

The movie was a hit and freaked out audiences when it came out. By today's standards, it's very tame. It's crazy how much we, as a society, have been desensitized to the grotesque that it's unlikely even a child would be frightened by the character's deformed face, but back then, it terrified folk.

It's entertaining, Vincent Price is always a pleasure, and the fight scenes have a humorous choreography synonymous with that time period.