For those of us born in the recent past, aka the 70’s, Vincent Price has always seemed like an iconic has-been. A frequent face on afternoon matinees, late night movies, and in magazines, and of course the voice of Thriller’s chilling finale, Price had been synonymous with horror royalty.
That wasn’t always the case for Midwest local boy (Missouri native) Price, and it is hard to wrap my head around that. It’s like finding out Spike Lee had made a half dozen movies before She’s Gotta Have It, and they were beach blanket teen flicks and a sequel to Oh God (with the incomparable George Burns).
Of course that isn’t true about Lee, but it would be as surprising.
This gets even further muddy for us not alive to see it all transpire in proper context because of the dual existence of Color and Black & White film. It feels like Price has been making movies since the talkies first rolled… but it simply isn’t the case.
House of Wax was one of those Hollywood breakout moments for Price, after which he was given any number of campy, set chewing villain roles. All of those macabre flicks you love? They came after this 1953 color gem. Google it. I was as skeptical as you.
Anyway, the movie. 3D movies were a cutting edge innovation at the time, and thankfully Warner Brothers wanted to get in the game. They commissioned a remake of their own 1933 creep show, Mystery of the Wax Museum, and it was off to the races in gorgeous full color and amazing sound. It was the first major studio 3D film, and also the first to feature stereophonic sound for average, wide release theaters.
The beef I have always had with 3D movies, new and old, is that the gimmick takes such a precedence that the film suffers. And headgear gets annoying, especially for us cursed with eyewear of our own necessity. Same goes for IMAX event movies, or CGI spectacles, but I digress.
Enter our hero, director Andre de Toth, an Austrian-American with one eye. He could not see the 3D effect and did not understand what the fuss was about, but he set out to make a fantastic movie to studio spec. This means the film was made with the intent to deliver titillation and chills, and it full delivers.
The film surrounds a slightly eccentric sculptor who runs a wax museum. His business partner is not seeing the immediate financial payoff he hoped for and leans on the sculptor, Jarrod (Price), to include more lurid and morbid displays to increase traffic. Jarrod, ever the artist, refuses to compromise. The investor then decides on a new course of action: arson and insurance fraud.
The museum burns and so does Jarrod, and the baddie gets his money and prepares to go on the lam with a hot to trot young woman with expensive tastes. His lovers’ holiday is interrupted by the appearance of a strange, hunched assassin who murders the investor then stages a faux suicide by hanging. Then, mysteriously, the body is stolen from the morgue.
Of course the assassin is the now deformed and twisted Jarrod, with a new dark outlook and mad obsession with the loss of his own hands to create. He hires a deaf, mute thug named Igor and ex-convict and alcoholic Leon to be his hands as he rebuilds a new, macabre wax museum.
The trick here is that he scouts subjects that inspire him to create, kills them, then dips their corpses in wax to create lifelike displays.
The other trick is that the handsome, beefcakey Igor is none other than a young Charles Bronson. Also, Janice Rand of the USS Enterprise (Grace Lee Whitney to civilians) is an uncredited cancan dancer.
The film only stops twice for protracted 3D tech demos, and neither is over-long or terribly out of place. One is a famous scene where a carnival barker draws crowds into the museum while juggling/doing tricks with paddleballs. The other is the cancan routine that feels anachronistic, but has its place.
All the trappings of horror films of that period are present: shrieking women, strong jawed macho heroes, copaganda movie police dicks, cackling villains, and so on. What was shocking, to me, was the brutality for the time. There is something unsettling about the breakaway wax face worn by Price and the unflinching camera during scenes of the murders. There is something seedy about the stalking of the young women, and the implied nudity of our heroine at the film’s climax. Even Price’s delivery of his velvet compliments, sex pest obsession, and feigned humility have the touch of ickiness that is absolutely delightful and unexpected from a 1953 movie.
House of Wax is an anomaly in the world of film. Chosen by the studio to be the test patient for two incredible technologies, featuring a then mid to low tier performers, and laid in the hands of a director that could not appreciate the gimmick for himself. Not only does it succeed as a visual and audio spectacle, it satisfies as a movie experience, and elevates horror as a genre.
Price is wonderful in this movie. He’d return to this template of monster time and time again, but this isn’t even a prototype character for him – it is a fully realized role in which he is fully Vincent Price and I could not imagine anyone but him pulling this one off. House of Wax is probably the one Price movie everyone needs to see once.