Ahh, the mid-2000s. Brendan Urie was chiming in with, “Haven’t you ever heard of closing the God Damn door?”, metalcore blasted on every station, the smell of black eyeliner and nail polish wafted through the air, and everyone could only see about half of what was around them because of the deeply gelled fringes. Essentially, emo was all the rage. However, despite its clear, of-its-era connections to alternative subcultures, the horror genre was at a weird point in its expansive existence. Between countless torture porn sequels, Japanese remakes, and an endless slew of oversaturated slashers, many films were grouped in this era as “trash”. While, undoubtedly, some of them were, this generalization caused many phenomenal films to go unnoticed or completely under the radar. This is the case with 2005’s House of Wax.

Supposedly a remake of the 1953 Vincent Price film with the same name, it could have less to do with the original. A familiar setup sees a group of college kids en route to their school’s football game, caught out of luck with a broken down car. That’s where the fun begins. They wind up camped out near a ghost town, seemingly empty except for one Bo Sinclair, who promises to help them out. As they begin to notice, it seems the only operational business is a wax museum…From then on out, we are welcomed into one of the wildest, genuinely creepiest slashers in modern memory. With dingy movie theaters, a nightmare-inducing wax museum, and one of the most nauseating and original MOs of any slasher villain, the flick feels like a walkthrough of a skillfully organized haunted attraction. Plus, it’s crammed with 2000s nostalgia, with visuals that make it feel like you’re watching a full-length Hawthorne Heights music video, and a soundtrack that cements it as one of the most 2005 movies of, well…2005.

A Terrifying Pair of Killers

One of the absolute highlights of House of Wax are the two killers, the Sinclair Brothers. Initially conjoined at birth, these twins work in tandem to run the town of Ambrose’s waxworks from Hell. Bo is the brains, luring in teens with a disarmingly normal demeanor, and wax-faced Vincent takes care of the more troublesome aspects of the business, the brutal torture and creation of the statues themselves. It harkens back to classics from the golden era of slashers, their twisted backwoods family reminiscent of Texas Chain Saw, or even the Voorhees clan in Friday The 13th. Vincent is the Leatherface to Bo’s Choptop. The Brothers’ Mom, Trudy, made wax statues, and after her death, Vincent wanted to innocently carry on her work. However, the psychopathic Bo manipulated him to make them better…more realistic…and that meant using corpses.

The means of offing teens from these brothers are some of the scariest in slasher history. Victims are paralyzed, drowned alive in boiling wax. They are forced to suffer as wax statues until they eventually die. The mannequins in the town are wax-transformed corpses, victims preserved like in a museum. It is definitely a little cheesy, and feels a lot like an early-2010s Creepypasta, but is still considerably bone chilling compared to a simple hockey mask and machete. It is a highly original MO, not only elevating the film in its own right, but putting it a step above other films in the 90s and 2000s slasher revival.

It’s All in the Vibes

During a chase scene, Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) and Nick (Chad Michael Murray) find themselves hiding from a shotgun-wielding, trucker-capped Bo Sinclair in a grimy movie theater. The theater is disgusting, covered in dust and grime, and no living human sits in the audience-only wax-mummified corpses, laden in filth and creeping bugs. Projected on the screen is Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, a hammer-on-the-head parallel for Bo and Vincent Sinclair’s disturbed sibling relationship. As Bette Davis belts out, “I’ve Written a Letter to Daddy”, Nick and Carly sit among the figures, hoping to remain still enough so the aisle-stalking Bo does not notice and fire at them. It is a genuinely edge-of-your-seat sequence, clever in its construction and framing, the use of the human mannequin’s doubling effect creating a genuinely disorienting feeling. However, what is truly striking here, as with the rest of the movie, is the aesthetic of it.

This scene is one of many examples of a movie that perfectly knows how to construct its setting and build a phenomenal atmosphere. The old creepy movie, the dingy cinema, rows of once-living mannequins, and a stalking serial killer’s slow-moving pervasiveness? Everything clicks perfectly here, and it feels possibly more akin to a Halloween Horror Nights event more-so than a movie…and this is actually for the better.

The rest of the movie feels the same, all of it having this Halloween-ish, grungy, 2000s tone to it. It feels reminiscent of Rob Zombie visuals, the palettes featuring a lot of dim yellows and gross-out, tree-greens. It is of its time, absolutely, but gleefully so. The movie basks in the era, in every aspect.

Speaking of the era, the soundtrack is pretty wild. It truly captures the best of music in that era, Interpol and Disturbed both get songs on there, as well as My Chemical Romance getting too. Hell, it does not get more emo than your film closing out with a smash-to-black on Helena from Three Cheers. In the 2000s, atmosphere was one of the strongest attributes of horror, with House of Wax being the crowning achievement.  It is disappointing how this, among many other movies, were lost or ignored due to the pure oversaturation of the genre. It is oftentimes a make-or-break for any horror film of any decade, aesthetic being debatably just as important in this genre.

House of Wax excels at all of this. Its setting, costumes, and props are all beautifully and skillfully created. Luckily, It has found its cult status in the last couple of years, but its over-the-top nature should have made it an instant classic upon release.

2010’s Black Swan was a career highlight for American writer-director Darren Aronofsky. The psychological horror movie about a mentally unstable ballet dancer was nominated for a plethora of awards, with lead actress Natalie Portman earning a SAG, a BAFTA, a Critics Choice, and (among many others) an Oscar for her performance. Aronofsky’s previous film, The Wrestler, was a change from his previous maximalist work. The stripped down, slice of life drama got the attention of mainstream Hollywood, and with Black Swan he reaped the rewards of his 10+ year filmmaking career. Horror films are rarely nominated by the Academy, making Portman’s win (alongside Jodie Foster’s in 1992 for Silence of the Lambs) an anomaly in Oscar history. Seven years would pass before another horror film was recognized at these awards; the next being 2017’s Get Out, which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. 

Portman’s character, Nina Sayers, is demure to a fault. The film focuses on her struggle to please both her domineering mother and the ballet company’s artistic director, Thomas Leroy (played by Vincent Cassel). Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake serves as a backdrop to Nina’s unraveling mental state while the demands of playing both Odette and Odile (the titular Black Swan) test her limits. As the people in her life take advantage of her, Nina imagines a series of grotesque body transformations and other frightening hallucinations.

Does Darren Aronofsky Understand Horror?

Aronofsky twists the plot of the ballet, through his character Thomas, to serve the metaphor of his own film. In Tchaikovsky’s original Swan Lake, both Odette and Odile are under the control of the evil sorcerer Rothbart. After begging for her forgiveness, the prince and Odette throw themselves into the lake, choosing to die together instead of living apart. In Black Swan, Thomas’ artistic vision has Odette as a pristine virgin, Odile as an evil seductress, and the prince leaves Odette to die alone, heartbroken. Thomas then sexually manipulates the innocent Nina to make her a “better” Odile. He threatens to replace her with another dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis), and Nina begins to confuse Lily’s actions with her own. She hallucinates a sexual relationship between her and Lily, and then between Lily and Thomas. The final moments suggest that Nina also dies, a victim of her own insanity, though what actually happens remains open to interpretation.

Aside from a few characters that link back to their Swan Lake inspirations, any other parallels are scant. Though Nina is an accomplished ballerina in New York City, something that takes an incredible amount of skill and strength, Aronofsky seems uninterested in her agency. He never counters Thomas’ corrupted interpretation of the ballet, and instead presents Nina as the perfect, broken girl, a caricature of innocence. The script heavily leans into the ‘hysterical’, ‘delusional’ woman horror tropes, tying her descent into madness with her own sexual awakening (and then tying this awakening to sexual assault). “I want to be perfect” she insists, one of the few things we learn about her dreams and desires. Any potential plot or character development is unraveled by continuous reveals that the events in the previous scene were imagined. Her attraction to Lily is left unexamined, making their hallucinatory sex scene just another “shocking” moment.

Where Black Swan flounders, a film like Micheal Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) soars. Isabelle Huppert plays Erika, an emotionally stunted woman stuck between a domineering mother and a demanding art form. Though Erika and Nina have little say over their day-to-day lives, Haneke purposely explores the ways that Erika asserts her agency, though they’re often upsetting and violent. Both films also deal with sexual assault, but Haneke makes a specific choice not to invoke any kind of male gaze; the camera barely moves as the actors play out the sequence. In Black Swan’s most sickening scene, Aronofsky directs the camera to follow Thomas’ hands as he assaults Nina, forcing the audience to assume the abuser’s perspective. Unlike Aronofsky, Haneke and Huppert managed to create complex, flawed characters that are frustrating and engaging, without ever infantilizing its protagonist.

Black Swan Represents the Worst of “Prestige” Horror

Black Swan also flails when compared to a more recent horror film about doppelgangers that has been recognized by the Academy Awards – The Substance. Back in 2010-11, the marketing around Black Swan leaned into its ‘prestige’ status as a way to legitimize the film’s grosser moments. Natalie Portman’s Oscar race campaign focused on her year-long training as a dancer and the authentic athleticism of her performance. This misguided quest for respectability gets in the way of the film’s campier moments, making the jumpscares and sudden gore feel out of place. In contrast, The Substance is interested in no such mainstream legitimacy. Director Coralie Fargeat embraced gore and camp to tell her story about female duality under the oppressive male gaze. Despite the absurdity of the plot, Fargeat’s characters and their struggles ground the story with depth and meaning.

Despite Black Swan’s initial success, Aronofsky’s career struggled as Black Swan faded out of the limelight. His biblical epic Noah went largely unnoticed, and his maximalist ode to inspiration Mother! (starring his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Jennifer Lawrence) deeply divided audiences. It would be over a decade before he’d return to the award circuit with 2023’s The Whale, for which lead actor Brendan Fraser won an Oscar. However, the issues that plague Black Swan also plague The Whale. The novel Moby Dick is supposed to be the backbone of his metaphor, but the connection between the titular whale and the protagonist is just that he’s fat – like a whale. He carries a lot of guilt – physically, on his body, as fat. That’s it. The Whale relies on lazy stereotypes under the guise of ‘high art’ to once again create a protagonist whose virtuousness lies in their ability to absorb everyone else’s abuse. 

Black Swan’s legacy represents the most frustrating aspects of “Academy Award” cinema, and its faults become clear when held against better films. It will always be a drama masquerading as horror, one that twists Nina’s abuse into art to serve a patriarchal gaze. Her psychosis and death are presented as a beautiful tragedy, a fetishized martyrdom to Thomas’s (and Aronofsky’s) artistic vision of a perfectly broken girl.