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.