House of Wax (1953)

House of Wax
Directed By	André de Toth
Produced By	Bryan Foy
Written By	Charles S. Belden (play) Crane Wilbur (screenwriter)
Starring	Vincent Price Frank Lovejoy Charles Bronson Carolyn Jones Phyllis Kirk
Music By	David Buttolph
Cinematography	Bert Glennon J. Peverell Marley Lothrop B. Worth
Editing By	Rudi Fehr
Distributed By	Warner Bros.
Release Date	Premiere: April 10th, 1953. Nationwide: April 25th, 1953.
Runtime	88 min.
Language	English
Budget	$1,000,000
Gross	$23,750,000

House of Wax is a 1953 3D horror film about a disfigured sculptor who repopulates his destroyed wax museum by murdering people and using their wax-coated corpses as displays. It is critically revered and often hailed as one of Vincent Price's most iconic performances.

Plot

Professor Henry Jarrod s a talented wax figure sculptor with a museum in 1890s New York.  He specializes in historical figures such as John Wilkes Booth, Joan of Arc, and one that he considers his masterpiece, Marie Antoinette. When his business partner Matthew Burke demands more sensational exhibits to increase profits, Jarrod refuses. Jarrod then gives a private tour to renowned art critic Sidney Wallace. Wallace, deeply impressed with Jarrod's sculptures, agrees to buy Burke out but will not be able to do so until after he returns from a continental trip.

That night, Burke deliberately sets the museum on fire, intending to claim the insurance money. In the process, he fights off Jarrod, who is desperately attempting to save his precious sculptures. Burke splashes kerosene over Jarrod's body and leaves him to die in the fire.

Miraculously, Jarrod survives, but with severe injuries including crippled hands. He builds a new House of Wax with help from deaf-mute sculptor Igor and another assistant named Leon Averill. Jarrod now concedes to popular taste and includes a "Chamber of Horrors" that showcases both historical crimes and recent events, such as the apparent suicide of his former business partner Burke. In reality, Burke was murdered by a cloaked, disfigured killer who then staged the death as a suicide. Burke's fiancée, Cathy Gray , is murdered soon afterward. Her body mysteriously disappears from the morgue.

Cathy’s friend Sue Allen visits the museum and is troubled by the strong resemblance of the Joan of Arc figure to her dead friend. Jarrod explains that Cathy was the model for the sculpture. Unsatisfied, Sue returns after hours and uncovers the horrifying truth behind the House of Wax: many of the figures are wax-coated corpses, including Cathy and Burke. Sue is confronted by Jarrod, who proclaims her his new "model" for a sculpture of Marie Antoinette. She fights him off, striking his face, which is revealed to be a wax mask that shatters and exposes fire-scarred flesh beneath. He subdues her and nearly succeeds in making her into a wax figure, but the police, having learned the whole truth from Averill, arrive in time to save her. Jarrod tries to escape, but gets into a fight with a policeman who knocks him into a vat of molten wax.

Cast

• Vincent Price as Professor Henry Jarrod
• Frank Lovejoy as Lt. Tom Brennan
• Carolyn Jones as Cathy Gray
• Phyllis Kirk as Sue Allen
• Paul Picerni as Scott Andrews
• Roy Roberts as Matthew Burke
• Paul Cavanagh as Sidney Wallace
• Dabbs Greer as Sgt. Jim Shane
• Charles Bronson (credited Charles Buchinsky) as Igor
• Angela Clarke as Mrs. Andrews
• Reggie Rymal as the paddleball barker
• Nedrick Young as Leon Averill (uncredited)

Background

Like CinemaScope and other wider-and-larger-screen formats, stereoscopy 3-D was an alternative technology that Hollywood]turned to in the early to mid-1950s in an attempt to compete with the television, which had halved theater attendance.

Just over fifty films were released in 3-D during its brief 1950s heyday, which dawned with the premiere of Bwana Devil in late November 1952, only began in earnest with the first major-studio 3-D releases in the spring of 1953, showed signs of faltering in the fall, seemed to be recovering in the winter, then rapidly faded and died early in 1954, with a belated last gasp provided by the spring 1955 release of Revenge of the Creature. Except for a very few occasional independent productions, such as September Storm (1960), The Bubble (1966), Andy Warhol's Frankenstein (1974) and some X-rated "adult" films, there would be no new English-language 3-D feature films until the early 1980s.

All of the 1950s US feature-length 3-D films were originally shown by the polarized light method and viewed through gray-lensed polarized glasses, but in the 1970s a few were theatrically re-released as red-and-blue-glasses anaglyph 3-D prints, which, unlike the original format, did not require special projection equipment and a non-depolarizing screen. Beginning in the early 1980s, anaglyph versions of several 1950s 3-D films were broadcast on television and released in home video formats. House of Wax was never theatrically shown, broadcast on television, or sold for home use in anaglyph form in the US, but an unauthorized anaglyph version on bootleg video or even 16mm film may exist.

During its original release, House of Wax used the two-strip Natural Vision 3-D format, which employed separate 35mm film prints for the left-eye and right-eye images, projected by two separate but interlocked projectors. This required making substantial alterations to the theater's projectors. In 1971, House of Wax was re-released in the convenient 35mm StereoVision single-strip format, which squeezed both images onto one strip of film and required only an external projector attachment and a non-depolarizing screen. StereoVision's deluxe 70mm version of their format, which made possible a clearer and brighter image, was used for engagements at large and prestigious venues such as Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood and the 4300-seat Metropolitan Theatre in Boston. After the initial heavily advertised 1971 re-release, StereoVision prints remained available for theatrical rental for several years and were occasionally shown later in the 1970s. A new wave of 3-D films in the early 1980s, which resulted in many theaters being equipped with the correct type of screen, increased interest in the 3-D films of the 1950s and prompted another re-release of House of Wax in 1982.

To accompany its stereoscopic imagery, House of Wax was originally available with a stereophonic three-track magnetic soundtrack, although many theaters were not equipped to make use of it and defaulted to the standard monophonic optical soundtrack. Previously, films with stereo sound were only produced to be shown in specialty cinemas, such as the Toldi in Budapest and the Telecinema in London.Apparently, only the monophonic soundtrack and a separate sound-effects-only track have survived. As of 2013, no copy of the original three-channel stereo soundtrack is known to exist. A new stereo soundtrack has recently been synthesized from the available source material.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary re-release of the film on 3D Blu-ray, it was screened for a theatrical audience, for the first time digitally, by the Santa Fe Film Festival and the Jean Cocteau Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on Halloween, 2013. Vincent Price's daughter, Victoria Price, and Constantine Nasr, director of the documentary House of Wax: Unlike anything You've Seen Before, were in attendance to talk about the making and history of the film. This was the first time the film was shown using a modern 4K Ultra-HD 3D video projector (Sony SRXR320P 4K Digital Cinema Projector). As in 1953, the audience wore polarized 3-D glasses, like those used to view modern 3-D films, not the red-and-blue anaglyph glasses used for the re-releases and videos of some other vintage films and now often mistakenly associated with the 3-D films of the 1950s.

Production

House of Wax, filmed under the working title The Wax Works, was Warner Bros.' answer to the surprise 3-D hit </nowiki>Bwana Devil, an independent production that premiered the previous November. Seeing something big in 3-D's future, Warner Bros. contracted Julian and Milton Gunzburg's Natural Vision 3-D system, the same one used for Bwana Devil, and filmed a remake of their 1933 thriller Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was based on Charles Belden's three-act play The Wax Works. Among the significant changes: the earlier film was set in the year it was released (1933) whereas House of Wax was moved back to the late 19th century; the entire newspaper angle and the characters played by Glenda Farrell and Frank McHugh were eliminated; and while the masked figure was only seen sparingly in Mystery, making his identity a bit of a puzzle, he is shown early and often in this remake, leaving no doubt that it is indeed the sculptor.

Among the foregrounded uses of 3-D in the film were scenes featuring a wax museum fire, can-can girls, and a paddleball-wielding pitchman. In what may be the film's cleverest and most startling 3-D effect, the shadowy figure of one of the characters seems to spring up out of the theater audience and lurch into the screen. Ironically, director André de Toth was blind in one eye and unable to experience stereo vision or the 3-D effects. “It’s one of the great Hollywood stories,” Vincent Price recalled. “When they wanted a director for a 3-D film, they hired a man who couldn’t see 3-D at all! André de Toth was a very good director, but he really was the wrong director for 3-D. He’d go to the rushes and say, ‘Why is everybody so excited about this?’ It didn’t mean anything to him. But he made a good picture, a good thriller. He was largely responsible for the success of the picture. The 3-D tricks just happened—there weren’t a lot of them. Later on, they threw everything at everybody.”Indeed, some modern critics agree that DeToth's inability to see the depth is what makes the film superior, as he was more concerned with telling a thrilling story and getting believable performances from the actors than simply tossing things at the camera.

Reception

House of Wax was one of the biggest hits of 1953, earning an estimated $5.5 million in rentals from North American box offices alone. Although long seen only in 2-D form on television and in occasional revival theater screenings, by the mid-1960s it was usually listed among the classic horror films and even touted as the best US horror film of the 1950s. It revitalized the film career of Vincent Price, who had been playing secondary character parts and occasional sympathetic leads since the late 1930s. After this high-profile role, he was always in high demand to play fiendish villains, mad scientists and other assorted deranged characters in genre films such as The Tingler, The Masque of the Red Death and The Abominable Dr. Phibes. Supporting player Carolyn Jones, whose career had barely begun when she appeared in House of Wax, found her widest and most lasting fame eleven years later as Morticia Addams in the TV comedy horror spoof The Addams Family.