Lecture Five
House of Wax

By the 1950s television was making inroads into the attendance at motion picture theaters. Clearly some solution had to be found to reverse the trend. This turned out to lead to a number of “experiments” in which films makers tried to make films which could do things television could not. Some were odd ball solution like Aromarama or Smell-O-Vision (Scent of Mystery (1960) with a guest appearance by Elizabeth Taylor, the wife of the producer, Michael Todd) in which smells were piped into the theater. This gimmick would be followed by John Waters “Odorama” or “scratch and sniff” film: Polyester (1981) ; the gimmicks of William Castle like “Emergo” for House on Haunted Hill (1959) in which a skeleton came off the screen over the audience. The one with the most impact was wide screen which started with the three camera three projector “Cinerama” and then developed into Cinemascope and a number of similar forms all with wide screen formats.(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_%28image%29)

One of the most obvious of these was 3D, although it lasted only a few years. The first of the 3D pictures of the 1950s was an independently produced Arch Obler story called Bwana Devil (1952), released through United Artists and fairly recently remade as The Ghost and the Darkness (1996). The success of the film produced a rash of 3D pictures very quickly. The second film, and the first produced by a major studio Man in the Dark (1953) was shot in 11 days. The third film a horror film that launched Vincent Price’s career as a horror film actor, was Warner Brothers’ House of Wax (1953). More followed and in 1954 Universal released The Creature from the Black Lagoon. A strange horror film called The Maze (1953) with Richard Carlson was also in 3D. Carlson is often seen in such horror and science fiction films as The Magnetic Monster (1953) and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), It Came from Outer Space (1953) and Riders to the Stars (1954). Science fiction addicts may recognize It Came from Outer Space as a the 3D film. Among the more famous 3D films are Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder (1954), and Kiss Me Kate (1953).

House of Wax (1954) is a remake of an earlier film, Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) which starred Lionel Atwell (Ivan Igor) and Fay Wray (Charlotte Duncan). Atwell is known to all horror movie fans as the police officer, Inspector Krough in Son of Frankenstein who plays the infamous game of darts with the Baron while sticking the darts into his wooden arm which he has as result of his actual arm being torn off by the monster. A tragic figure, Atwill effectively ruined his developing motion picture career in 1943. He was involved in what was said to be an "orgy" at his home, some of the guests were naked and pornographic films were shown--and a rape was held to have been perpetrated during the proceedings. Atwill "lied like a gentleman," it was said, in the court proceedings to protect the identities of his guests and was convicted of perjury and sentenced to five years' probation. This was later removed from the record but the Hollywood censorship board was not impressed. As a result he was anathema in Hollywood and unable to work on Broadway and wound up working for Producers Releasing Corporation – a poverty row studio. He also got occasional work with Universal.

Fay Wray comes from her appearance in King Kong some 2 years earlier.

In the 3D remake, House of Wax, Lionel Atwell role is taken over by Vincent Price (now Prof. Henry Jarrod instead of Ivan Igor) and Fay Wray is replaced by Phyllis Kirk (now Sue Allen instead of Charoltte Duncan). The film is also notable for the appearance of Charles Buchinski playing Igor the deaf mute assistant to Prof Jarrod. Buchinski would change his name to Charles Bronson within a year. Another interesting fact is that the director, Andre de Toth only had one eye and seems an odd choice to direct a 3D film!

The title House of Wax is also used for another more recent film made in 2005 and which should be avoided.

The film itself opens on a dark rainy street with titles looking like they are made from melting wax. The camera moves into the wax museum in which we see a shadow on the wall of an upraised arm with a knife. Although as the film progress the statue if gone and the discussion assures us there is no “horror” in the museum with the one exception of showing Booth and the assassination of Lincoln.

The film sets up Jarrod as a pleasant perhaps mildly naïve man who talks to his own creations as though they were real and claims they talk to him. Like Frankenstein, he has children he created without a female. He claims that destroying them would be “murder” and again the equation of the creation of a work of art with procreation is established. This is not unique to horror films (as we pointed out with James Barrie’s The White Bird) but often imposes something of dark side to the story.

Once the museum is ablaze, the melting wax animates the inanimate figures and the heat causes movement in the cloth used for costuming, Non animate things become animate blurring the distinctions between the two categories. This trope or motif will continue with wax figures being real people (under the wax) and real people being accidently or deliberately mistaken for wax figures. Similar confusion occurs in the morgue where dead bodies move as a result of the “embalming fluid” and where a real person pretends to be dead and sits up just like the dead ones do.

The police in the film indicate some semblance of rationality (intuition isn’t important in police work, facts are says the inspector). Yet it is Sue’s intuition and not the police work which is correct. They deny she could have seen the figure she saw chase her, but the audience has seen it too – and as in The Wolf Man where the doctor explains away Talbot’s transformation, the audience has already seen it and knows the scientist (rational) is wrong.

The film is also filled with 3D effects with objects being thrown at the camera, bodies moving very close to the lens.

Deriving a subtext from a film generally relies on the interpretation of symbols in the film. A symbol is something which represents something else in an arbitrary way. The word “dog” is a symbol for the animal, whereas the dog’s footprint is not since it is not arbitrary. Most analysis lean heavily on Freud and the sex is the ultimate referent, but it is always possible that sex represents something else. That is sex itself is a symbol.

Symbols are often said to be “hyperloaded” that is to say they contain many meanings at one time, hence they may have multiple referents which are being linked by the creative artist.

House of Wax introduces us to another kind of horror film – the deranged person as the locus or site of horror. Although some psychological horror is evident in films where we have repressed sexuality as something that leads to the “eruption of the repressed” some films have focused more on the insanity than the repression. In some ways The Bad Seed is a similar film. Such films have often produced outcries from segments of the population who see such films as demeaning or misrepresenting mentally ill people and indicating that they are all homicidal. Psycho was included in the list of films that angered some people. Here again the question of whether or not we believe film can have an impact or “it is just a movie” raises its ugly head. In a sense the horror in the film is represented OUTWARDLY through disfigurement. Jarrad’s own horror at the destruction of his art leads to his attempt to reestablish his museum which is is no longer capable of byt sculpting. He regards his creations and children and here again the idea of creation and art become inexorably linked as they do in other films at different levels. The film also seems to regard obsession as something negative and it is Jarrad’s obsession with Marie Antoinette which one may see as some sort of repressed sexuality. Jarrad is unmarried, sees his creations as his children (like Frankenstein) so in a sense, House of Wax does deal with a kind of eruption of the repressed, but in a rather different way than happens in other films like Cat People. Like most of these films though, Jarrod has a double nature most clearly expressed inn Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In some ways the primitive and the id are linked and if it is not the id, it is the past which is dangerous (see The Mummy, films with resurrected dinosaurs –after WWII thanks to atomic energy, but there are dinosaurs on the loose before (and a few even after – in remote places – as in Unknown Island, The Land that Time Forgot etc.). So the equation of the id with primitiveness and the ego with society has interesting implications that we will explore later.