Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, House of Wax is loosely based on a 1953 film of the same name starring Vincent Price as a murderous sculptor who builds his own Madame Tussauds by casting the bodies of his victims in wax. This earlier iteration is based on an even earlier iteration from 1933, which in turn is based on a short story by Charles S. Belden. Collet-Serra’s House of Wax, which bears resemblance to its predecessors in name only, stars Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Jared Padalecki, and the aforementioned Paris as a group of teens stranded in the woods after their car breaks down on the way to a football game. Their search for a replacement fan belt leads them to Ambrose, a rural ghost town known for its wax museum, where the teens encounter a pair of bloodthirsty brothers hellbent on repopulating the once-vibrant community with the wax-coated carcasses of their murdered prey. Formulaic and overly expository, House of Wax replaces genuine suspense with cliche dialogue, cartoonish gore, and jump scares too predictable to inspire true terror, making it the perfect horror movie for skittish little babies like me.
A movie set in a wax museum and featuring the world’s most famous socialite lends itself pretty well to an exploration of fame and authenticity. Instead, House of Wax ignores these obvious themes in favour of an unclear thesis concerning good, evil, and the nature of siblinghood. The movie is rife with sets of twins: Elisha Cuthbert stars as the well-behaved sister to Chad Michael Murray’s delinquent twin brother; the movie’s bloodthirsty murderers, both played by Cougartown’s Brian Van Holt, are conjoined twins separated at birth in a procedure that left one twin permanently disfigured and marked as an outcast. Even the movie’s writers, Chad and Carey Hayes, are twins. What are we to make of all these pairs? Apparently, nothing. There’s some vague messaging about good eggs, bad apples, and the redemption of black sheep, but the most coherent idea House of Wax manages to communicate is that some people are nice, some people are mean, and some people are twins. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? plays on a loop in the abandoned Ambrose cinema, another opportunity to signal the horrors of celebrity that instead becomes part of a heavy-handed parable about being nice to your sibling.
"In anticipation of its premiere, the movie launched a publicity campaign featuring the slogan See Paris Die!, a cheeky stunt exemplifying the kind of casual misogyny that defined the mid-aughts."
Where plot fails, casting delivers. No one boasts a good performance, but to observe this particular slate of mid-2000s personalities in relation to one another is the only thing that makes House of Wax worth watching. Take, for example, Chad Michael Murray and Jared Padalecki, the movie’s male leads. Murray, blue-eyed and button-nosed, plays a soft-spoken, emotionally wounded troublemaker similar to the character that brought him fame on the teen soap opera One Tree Hill. Padalecki, dark hair and dark eyes, plays Cuthbert’s sensible and straight-laced boyfriend, a role similar to the one he plays in Gilmore Girls. Here are two sides of the same all-American fantasy: a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and another you can bring home to mom. The two archetypes vie for Cuthbert’s attention, creating an erotic triangulation that goes from banal to uncomfortable when you remember that one of the archetypes is supposed to be Cuthbert’s brother.
Like their male counterparts, the female leads in House of Wax are placed in opposition. Getting her start as the host of the educational after-school program Popular Mechanics for Kids, Elisha Cuthbert parlayed her early success into a career defined by the elasticity of her wholesome image. Her breakout role in The Girl Next Door, for example, saw her bend this persona into a flirtatious former porn star, while in House of Wax, she reverts to the comforting picture of bright-eyed moral certitude I recognized from childhood. Who better to play Cuthbert’s freewheeling friend and foil than Paris Hilton, whose appearances across reality TV and amateur pornography had recently cemented her as America’s preeminently loose party girl. Interrupted halfway through a striptease, Paris’s character meets a gruesome, untimely end, while Cuthbert’s survives as the virtuous Final Girl. The opposite seems to hold true in terms of their careers: the inoffensive Cuthbert, poised to become a Hollywood starlet, never quite transcended B-list obscurity; Paris, on the other hand, permanently occupies a space in the popular imagination despite the collective vitriol she’s shouldered, or maybe even because of it. I’ve raised House of Wax as a topic of conversation among a number of friends, and barely anyone has mentioned Elisha Cuthbert. What inevitably comes up is Paris Hilton, and what it was like to see her die.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, House of Wax is loosely based on a 1953 film of the same name starring Vincent Price as a murderous sculptor who builds his own Madame Tussauds by casting the bodies of his victims in wax. This earlier iteration is based on an even earlier iteration from 1933, which in turn is based on a short story by Charles S. Belden. Collet-Serra’s House of Wax, which bears resemblance to its predecessors in name only, stars Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Jared Padalecki, and the aforementioned Paris as a group of teens stranded in the woods after their car breaks down on the way to a football game. Their search for a replacement fan belt leads them to Ambrose, a rural ghost town known for its wax museum, where the teens encounter a pair of bloodthirsty brothers hellbent on repopulating the once-vibrant community with the wax-coated carcasses of their murdered prey. Formulaic and overly expository, House of Wax replaces genuine suspense with cliche dialogue, cartoonish gore, and jump scares too predictable to inspire true terror, making it the perfect horror movie for skittish little babies like me.
A movie set in a wax museum and featuring the world’s most famous socialite lends itself pretty well to an exploration of fame and authenticity. Instead, House of Wax ignores these obvious themes in favour of an unclear thesis concerning good, evil, and the nature of siblinghood. The movie is rife with sets of twins: Elisha Cuthbert stars as the well-behaved sister to Chad Michael Murray’s delinquent twin brother; the movie’s bloodthirsty murderers, both played by Cougartown’s Brian Van Holt, are conjoined twins separated at birth in a procedure that left one twin permanently disfigured and marked as an outcast. Even the movie’s writers, Chad and Carey Hayes, are twins. What are we to make of all these pairs? Apparently, nothing. There’s some vague messaging about good eggs, bad apples, and the redemption of black sheep, but the most coherent idea House of Wax manages to communicate is that some people are nice, some people are mean, and some people are twins. Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? plays on a loop in the abandoned Ambrose cinema, another opportunity to signal the horrors of celebrity that instead becomes part of a heavy-handed parable about being nice to your sibling.
"In anticipation of its premiere, the movie launched a publicity campaign featuring the slogan See Paris Die!, a cheeky stunt exemplifying the kind of casual misogyny that defined the mid-aughts."
Where plot fails, casting delivers. No one boasts a good performance, but to observe this particular slate of mid-2000s personalities in relation to one another is the only thing that makes House of Wax worth watching. Take, for example, Chad Michael Murray and Jared Padalecki, the movie’s male leads. Murray, blue-eyed and button-nosed, plays a soft-spoken, emotionally wounded troublemaker similar to the character that brought him fame on the teen soap opera One Tree Hill. Padalecki, dark hair and dark eyes, plays Cuthbert’s sensible and straight-laced boyfriend, a role similar to the one he plays in Gilmore Girls. Here are two sides of the same all-American fantasy: a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and another you can bring home to mom. The two archetypes vie for Cuthbert’s attention, creating an erotic triangulation that goes from banal to uncomfortable when you remember that one of the archetypes is supposed to be Cuthbert’s brother.
Like their male counterparts, the female leads in House of Wax are placed in opposition. Getting her start as the host of the educational after-school program Popular Mechanics for Kids, Elisha Cuthbert parlayed her early success into a career defined by the elasticity of her wholesome image. Her breakout role in The Girl Next Door, for example, saw her bend this persona into a flirtatious former porn star, while in House of Wax, she reverts to the comforting picture of bright-eyed moral certitude I recognized from childhood. Who better to play Cuthbert’s freewheeling friend and foil than Paris Hilton, whose appearances across reality TV and amateur pornography had recently cemented her as America’s preeminently loose party girl. Interrupted halfway through a striptease, Paris’s character meets a gruesome, untimely end, while Cuthbert’s survives as the virtuous Final Girl. The opposite seems to hold true in terms of their careers: the inoffensive Cuthbert, poised to become a Hollywood starlet, never quite transcended B-list obscurity; Paris, on the other hand, permanently occupies a space in the popular imagination despite the collective vitriol she’s shouldered, or maybe even because of it. I’ve raised House of Wax as a topic of conversation among a number of friends, and barely anyone has mentioned Elisha Cuthbert. What inevitably comes up is Paris Hilton, and what it was like to see her die.