Brendan Jesus
What’s a nostalgic film that never fails to transport you to a time you hold dearly to your heart? Everyone has at least one. I have way too many. Some of my most cherished memories were watching a plethora of movies during AMC’s FearFest or SciFi/SyFy’s 31 Days of Halloween with my mom. The leaves changing, smelling the smoke of fireplaces and campfires in my cusp-of-the-woods childhood home, the brisk air…it is hands down my favorite time of the year. Whether I liked the films for the day’s lineup or not, I always looked forward to getting home from school, making some popcorn, and putting one of the marathons on. I loved seeing films like Ghost Ship, House on Haunted Hill, Wrong Turn, and Dead Silence on the docket. But there was one film I would drop anything to watch, a film that is my penultimate October-feeling movie, and film that is House of Wax.
Upon release, House of Wax was considered a failure in most aspects. Receiving a C+ Cinemascore (though The Emoji Movie received a B, so who cares), barely scraping its budget back, receiving overwhelmingly negative reviews, and boasting a fairly misogynistic advertising campaign, House of Wax fought a constant uphill battle. Negatives aside, this film would go on to have a fairly substantial cult fandom behind it, and even received one of the biggest honors for a genre film with a Shout! Factory 2k remaster in 2021. What makes House of Wax so great? Is it the brilliant practical effects (not looking at you, climax scene)? The exceptional world-building? Or the soundtrack full of certified bangers? Let’s jump right into the madness that is 2005’s House of Wax.
Starring a who’s who of mid-aughts talent, and a couple of who’s almost going to be who, House of Wax is a namesake remake of the ’53 Vincent Price vehicle, though this remake couldn’t be farther from its predecessor. A group of friends, Carly (Elisha Cuthbert), Wade (Jared Padalecki), Paige (Paris Hilton), Ricky (Robert Ri’chard), Nick (Chad Michael Murray), and Dalton (Jon Abrahams) embark on a trip to see “the football game of a lifetime.” After taking a detour to save an hour, the friends decide to set up camp for the night. A mysterious stranger visits their campsite, prompting the hotheaded Nick to throw a beer bottle at his truck, smashing his front headlight. From there, all hell breaks loose when they find one of their cars inoperable. Wade and Carly take a trip into town, with the assistance of the third Sinclair brother (Damon Herriman). What happens in this sleepy town will push these friends to the very end of their sanity, and one mistake is all it will take for them to be the next inductee in the town’s House of Wax.
To start, plainly, I love this movie. While my nostalgia-fueled goggles probably have something to do with that, there’s just something about this film that checks all my boxes. Founded by Joel Silver Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, House of Wax was produced by Dark Castle Entertainment, so it’s fair to say House of Wax was a big-budget Hollywood horror flick. Even with a niche genre production company behind it House of Wax feels simultaneously big and low budget.
One of the biggest aspects of feeling low budget is how there was still a heavy reliance on practicals over digital effects in the scenes where it was possible. Each kill feels raw and overly visceral in a way that feels almost uncouth for a big-budget horror film. I think everyone has the same favorite kill, which is when Wade gets his skill peeled off by Dalton before getting the front third of his jaw sliced off. Two things set this apart from the other kills: one is the minor details that sell the emotional weight, and the second is the entire leadup to the kill.
If you’re unfamiliar, Wade is wandering through Bo’s (Brian Van Holt) house (every door seems to be unlocked for Wade) when the lights go out. Vincent appears and slices his Achilles tendon with a pair of scissors. Once in Vincent’s assembly room (we’ll come back to this), he waxes all of Wade’s facial hair off and then covers him in molten wax while he’s still alive. Later in the film, Dalton stumbles upon Wade’s wax figure sitting at the piano. Trying to get his attention, Dalton pokes his face, noticing the weird waxy texture. That’s when Dalton starts peeling Wade’s cheek skin off piece by piece. Wade’s eyes race left and right at a frantic pace, with a single tear falling down his cheek. Vincent finds Dalton, and a fight ensues. Wade meets his tragic demise as Vincent swings a bladed weapon at Dalton, misses Dalton, and slices Wade’s right cheek and jaw clear off. The exposed teeth and muscles pulse with Wade’s final heartbeats as his eyes roll back in his head. It’s truly violent and heartbreaking.
Even my favorite kill is just the tip of the practical iceberg of terror. Carly gets her finger snipped off through a sewer grate, and it looks almost too realistic. Ricky gets stabbed in the neck, and Vincent puts his boot to the handle of the blade, pushing it deeper into his neck until the holster is hindered from going any farther in. Those are all great, but the runner-up for best kill is hands down Paris Hilton. This kill brings us to something I glossed over earlier: the misogynistic marketing materials used for this film. And this is also where I run into a bit of an issue with my enjoyment of the film.
What makes a slasher film great? Sure, the kills, the antagonist, and the group of protagonists are part of the equation—but really, it’s the kills. Now, you can interpret this how you want, but it also shows how gatekeeper-y our genre can be sometimes. Paris Hilton is the last person you would expect to be in a film like this, and it wouldn’t be her last genre film. Horror has always been about subverting expectations and pushing boundaries.
Seeing someone like Paris Hilton in a film like this is almost amazing. The way we form parasocial relationships with celebrities is tragic, and the way the genre was livid with Hilton’s casting goes against everything horror stands for. Horror was, is, and always will be a genre for everyone. Whether you’re an outcast or an elite, horror is for you. It’s sad to see that instead of telling fans to shut up about their constant whining about Paris being in this film, they turned their marketing to “See Paris Die.” Yes, it’s a slasher film and we’re expecting people to be killed in awful ways, but to divert your advertisement to hyping potential viewers up by telling them they are going to see this person they despise die in a horrible way is abhorrent. Whether you like Paris Hilton or not, the whole idea just seems gross to me. Also, people constantly asked Hilton if the video camera scenes were added as a reference to her sex tape. Grow up.
(I should note, Paris Hilton was seemingly fine with the advertising campaign, but I am unsure as to if it was due to circumstances. That doesn’t negate how awful it was.)
Let’s talk about Hilton’s performance. House of Wax isn’t the last time she would dip her toe into horror. A few years later, she would go on to star in Repo! The Genetic Opera and an episode of Supernatural that would pit her and Jared Padalecki back into the horror of a wax museum. And honestly, she’s not a bad actress. She’s not amazing, but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t seem like she was giving 100%. Thankfully, House of Wax doesn’t just use Hilton as a sex symbol; rather, she is fully realized. Paige is a knows-what-she-wants kind of girl who is deeply in love with her boyfriend Ricky. She thinks she’s pregnant, and I think this fuels how hard she pushes to survive Vincent. The chase scene between Vincent and Paige is tense and violent, and you honestly cannot say that Hilton acts poorly in this scene. From that scene alone, Paris Hilton can honorably be labeled as a scream queen.
There are definitely issues with House of Wax, and the most glaring issue has to be the relationship between Wade and Carly, and Carly and Nick. Carly is getting ready to move to New York City after getting an internship at In Style magazine. Wade is nervous to move out there, and this puts a bit of a strain on their relationship. Freshly bonded out of jail for grand theft auto, Nick joins them on the trip. It’s pretty clear that Nick would do anything in his power to protect his sister Carly, but there are points where their relationship feels more incestuous and kind of gross. I think this is in part because Elisha Cuthbert and Chad Michael Murray simply had better chemistry together than she did with Jared Padalecki. It doesn’t seem as if brother/sister love was ever written into their characters, and it was just an unfortunate accident that makes things feel a bit gross.
When rewatching this film for this piece, there was one thought I couldn’t get out of my head. Could you have imagined if Rob Zombie wrote and directed this? Using the Deftones and My Chemical Romance was an amazing choice for the product we see on screen, but really, just imagine if Zombie helmed this. Everything about the idea of House of Wax screams hellbilly. Throwing the RZ flair into this story is something that needed to happen at the time, though with Zombie’s current output, I don’t think we need it at this time.
Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up the set design. Crews built the entire town of Ambrose from the ground up in Asmara. Nowadays, they’d probably just use a sound stage for the street scenes. Seeing this fully realized town from aerial shots gives a sense of grandness to the town, and makes it feel all too real. Ambrose tells a story visually, something that can only be created by the expert craftspersonship that went into it. The true star of the set design is Vincent’s, for lack of a better term, laboratory. A naturally sepia-tone room is full of cauldrons of bubbling wax on top of large spitting flames, and rusted pipes line all aspects of the room—you definitely don’t want to find yourself trapped down here. It somehow feels more wicked than Leatherface’s tanning room.
House of Wax was a film that found me at the perfect time in my life. I have a handful of comfort or go-to films, and this is one of them. It never fails that I forget the twist that Bo is actually Vincent, and vice versa, which was criminally smart of them and definitely a comment on not judging a book by its cover. There is nary an October that goes by where I don’t watch this film. Seeing Paris Hilton vary off her usual path to the uncomfortable scene of Carly ripping her glued lips apart, this film is wall-to-wall bonkers. I hesitate to label it a slashic for the community, but it is undeniably a slashic for me.
