Best Of The Worst: House Of Wax (2005)

At the height of slasher remake fever in the early aughts, the gleefully campy “House of Wax” stands out as one of the best of the worst.

House of Wax is one of those films you can rewatch endlessly once you embrace it for what it is: a raunchy teen horror.

House of Wax began life as a 1933 film titled Mystery Of The Wax Museum, directed by Micheal Curtiz (Casablanca, The Adventures Of Robin Hood). It was one of the first films to use technicolor in a significant way. It was first reimagined in 1953 with the Vincent Price vehicle, House of Wax, in which Price gave one of the best performances of his career. It offered an innovative 3D story of revenge with a melodramatic twist.

In the film, Price’s Professor Henry Jarrod is a talented sculptor who opens a wax museum dedicated to historical figures who have met grisly demises. What begins as an admiration for wax figures’ pure and innocent beauty soon becomes corrupted when his assistant cautions that people are looking for something more macabre from the attraction. He suggests burning the museum down to collect the insurance money, eventually starting a fire that destroys Jarrod’s work and leaves him for dead as the building explodes. Jarrod miraculously survives and decides to finally give the people what they want in the most gruesome and horrific way imaginable.

When another remake of this horror classic was announced for 2005, it generated a lot of buzz among horror fans.

There were high hopes for this reimagining with Joel Silver as a producer and Jaume Collet-Serra directing (who went on to direct popular films The Shallows and Orphan).

The 2005 version centers around a group of teens, including our twin protagonists Carly Jones (Elisha Cuthbert) and Nick Jones ( Chad Micheal Murray), getting stranded on the borders of a strange town. It’s a town full of wax figures, with the titular House of Wax at its center.

Despite what seems like a generic plot, the remake elevates the original to a new level, adding more of a setting and bigger risks.

House of Wax‘s special effects and makeup are a breath of fresh air; you can’t deny that the film thrives in these areas.

This was something other remakes at the time were not doing well, and it helped make House of Wax a standout.

The film embraces its R rating with creative and gory kills. Its most disturbing moment comes when (spoiler alert) Wade (Supernatural star Jared Padalecki) has his face covered in wax. Attempts to free his face result in peeling off his actual skin. It’s a disturbing and terrifying scene that still holds up today.

There’s an interesting theme of twin siblings running throughout the film, yet not much comes out of that intriguing premise. We do, however, get some brilliant imagery. Side stories try to build interesting backstories for our characters, but they are not fully developed.

Character-building attempts are very clear, but at its core, it’s not as deep as it tries to be. Still, the dynamic involving twin brothers makes it unique and helps distinguish it from other era slashers.

Paris Hilton, who plays Paige Edwards, was so excited to star in a horror movie and be taken seriously for trying new ventures.

Once she saw the marketing campaign that included the tagline, “See Paris die,” she realized her casting was a marketing gimmick to capitalize on the Paris hate that was popular at the time. The marketers even made shirts that said, “May 6th, See Paris die.”

This seemed to be the birth of viral marketing in the pre-social media age.

Despite this mean-spirited and misogynistic campaign, Paris embraced it and made the most of the publicity. As always, she seems to be at the center of many misconceptions about her and a master of manipulating her image to further her career.

She was an underrated scream queen who holds a special place in my heart. Although people may have loved her death scene for all the wrong reasons, it remains one of the most iconic in the slasher genre.

House of Wax is a campy classic. Unfortunately, it takes itself too seriously, which lets it down overall. It is inventive for a remake despite being an obvious cash grab. It’s got some solid ideas that, if built upon, could have resulted in a truly great horror film.

It failed at the box office, making only 40 million against a budget of 70 million. However, it has since earned a devoted cult following.

Once you revisit House of Wax and appreciate its lack of logic and overuse of gore, it becomes a guilty pleasure you can fully embrace.

The early 2000s gave us an abundance of bad horror, but House of Wax, with all its cringe and gore, is the kind of bad horror that’s still endlessly fun to watch and memorable in a way that most bad horror could only hope to achieve.