House of Wax review.
Horror king Vincent Price stars in this 1953 horror gem. While it feels very much of its era…what worked in House of Wax then still works today. Patient, confident, and unsettling. A memorable experience whether you saw it 70 years ago…or are watching for the first time.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
House of Wax
Directed by André de Toth
Screenplay by Crane Wilbur
Starring Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, Phyllis Kirk, Carolyn Jones and Paul Picerni
House of Wax Review
I first saw House of Wax at a very young age. It was probably on a Saturday afternoon on network tv. The film would have been over 30 years old at that point. A relic from a simpler time in horror history. While theater screens were running red with the blood spilled by Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger, a time when horror was at a pop culture peak…a classic horror movie from the 50s was daytime tv fodder. Innocent enough for anyone’s eyes who may have flipped on channel 6 at noon. Time dulls everything as genres continue to push boundaries. But House of Wax has stuck with me since that first afternoon. The effect of seeing corpses coated in wax lasted far longer than the first time I saw Jason take a machete to an unsuspecting teen. The movie is now twice as old as it was when I first saw it. It would still have the same effect today.
It’s been 70 years since House of Wax hit theaters. Horror has become bloodier and more frantic than anyone in 1953 could have foreseen. The wilder the genre got the more effective the stillness of this movie became. Bodies preserved in a wax veneer…lifeless human eyes staring back at you. The horror isn’t that they can’t move…it’s that they once did. When the truth of the lifelike figures is revealed, appropriately in a quietly horrifying fashion, it only confirms what we already know…but it reinforces why the time spent amongst the wax statues is so unnerving.
Vincent Price stars as Professor Henry Jarrod. It’s easy to dismiss that as “of course he does…he’s the horror guy”! But that part of his career didn’t really start until later in the decade. He had done a couple of horror movies in his 15-year career before House of Wax…but he was decidedly not the “horror guy” yet. After 1958 his career would become synonymous with horror. In 1953 he was still getting his feet wet. He’s excellent…as he always was.
House of Wax begins with Jarrod as a happy, but unsuccessful, sculptor. His business partner is fed up with the failure of their wax museum and burns it down for the insurance money. Wax figures melt as Jarrod fails to escape the flames. When we catch up with Jarrod he is confined to a wheelchair and his hands have been rendered useless to his craft.
Well…kind of. Before we see this version of Jarrod, we first encounter a heavily burned man who murders his business partner and his fiancé, Cathy (Carolyn Jones from The Addams Family). The fiancé’s body is later stolen from the morgue. It’s impossible to watch House of Wax and not immediately know that this murderer is Jarrod. It’s a fully scarred man taking revenge on the man who screwed Jarrod over…and left him to die in a fire. Where House of Wax gets interesting is when we see Jarrod soon after…his face completely unscarred. It’s enough to make you question what is going on, at least.
The story of House of Wax really begins when Cathy’s roommate Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) comes to the wax museum. She recognizes Cathy’s face in Jarrod’s Joan of Arc statue. No one believes her, of course, but she is positive that it is Cathy under the wax. Jarrod sees his beloved Marie Antoinette statue when he sees Sue’s face. He wants Sue to model for him…and we know what that means. Using the invitation to continue her investigation…Sue finds herself alone in the museum after it’s closed. She pulls the dark wig from the Joan of Arc statue and finds Cathy’s blonde hair underneath.
It’s here that Jarrod reveals himself to be the scar-faced murderer in spectacular fashion. Sue strikes at Jarrod when he attempts to restrain her…shattering his Vincent Price head to reveal the disfigured face underneath. The one-two punch of Cathy’s hair and Jarrod’s face being destroyed is top notch horror. Not just for the 1950s…for all time.
All that remains is the exciting climax of near deaths and a villain who gets his just desserts in a pit of wax. It’s an exciting conclusion to a movie that remained as still and patient as the wax figures filling its frames. 70 years into its existence the eyes of the wax statues will stick with you. The “mysteries” of House of Wax aren’t mysterious…but the reveals work incredibly well anyway. The lifelessness of the statues and these reveals combine with a great Vincent Price performance to deliver a classic horror experience.
Scare Value
The 1950s wasn’t the greatest decade for horror. There are some classics, obviously. Fans of sci-fi horror probably found themselves in heaven. Straight up murdering unsettling horror, however? Well, it wasn’t what was in fashion. Enter House of Wax. With its creepy corpse filled wax figures and Vincent Price’s expertise…this is one of the finest horror films of the era. What it does best works as well today as it did 70 years ago.
4/5
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House of Wax Trailer
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