House of Wax 1953

Professor Henry Jarrod is a true artist whose wax sculptures are lifelike. He specializes in historical tableaus such a Marie Antoinette or Joan of Arc. His business partner Matthew Burke needs some of his investment returned to him and pushes Jarrod to have more lurid exposes like a chamber of horrors. When Jarrod refuses Burke set the place alight destroying all of his beautiful work in the hope of claiming the insurance. Jarrod is believed to have died in the fire but he unexpectedly reappears some 18 months later when he opens a new exhibit. This time his displays focus on the macabre but he has yet to reproduce his most cherished work Marie Antoinette. When he meets his new assistants beautiful friend Sue Allen he knows hes found the perfect model only unbeknown to anyone he has a very particular way of making his wax creations.

Review

Ostensibly a shocker and a spectacle House of Wax is one of the great films about films. It works brilliantly as a horror one of the few films to reek of dread and death some of the grisly images (Jarrods partner hanging down an elevator shaft later exhibited in the museum) are inspired the suspense sequences combine eerie visual beauty with fundamental sexual fears (the films treatment of independent women in a patriarchal world is very astute in the housewife 50s). Vincent Prices performance as a man who can only feel alive with the dead is very moving.

But Waxs selfreflexivity is unprecedented in Hollywood films since the silents. It is a film using a novel spectacle (3D) to encourage greater realism concentrating on gruesome sensation. The film is about a museum also called House of Wax also a novel spectacle also more realistic and also gruesomely sensationalist. The films artifice is always prominent most violently with the pingpong man bridging the gap between film and audience by assailing us. What we are doing watching a House of Wax is what the characters are doing. And we know what happens to THEM...