House of Wax (1953)

Why do these screams matter?

Known for its suspenseful storytelling and innovative use of 3D technology, André de Toth’s House of Wax (1953) is a curious remake of Michael Curtiz’s Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933). Plot wise, both films follow a similar trajectory. Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price), a talented wax sculptor, is poised for international acclaim when a museum fire set by his business associate permanently destroys all of Henry’s art pieces. Bereft at losing his “friends,” Henry opens a new museum that caters to the macabre and that, unbeknownst to visitors, uses the corpses of murdered people to create eerily realistic exhibits. But whereas the 1933 film privileges the mystery of the story and the sleuthing of Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell), a hard-drinking news reporter, House of Wax centers its heroine’s quest for justice. In the film, Sue Allen (Phyllis Kirk) captures the attention of Henry when he is quick to note her resemblance to his most cherished wax creation, Marie Antoinette. But when Sue notices that Henry’s latest statue bears an uncanny likeness to her recently murdered friend, Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones), she sets out to unravel the dark secrets hidden within the House of Wax. As the audience’s surrogate, Sue’s reactions are intended to anticipate those of the viewer which makes the narrative differences between Florence and Sue with regard to Henry’s physical disabilities all the more interesting. While the former’s screams unequivocally cast Henry as an Other due to his post-fire scarring, the latter’s screams attempt to thread a fine needle in which Henry’s disability is part of his villain origin story without being central to his monstrosity.

Scars as a point of physical disability that are coded as monstrous have a long history in horror. From Creature in Frankenstein (1931) to Erique Claudin in Phantom of the Opera (1943) to Freddy in Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), the genre has a troublesome history of using facial scarring as a point of spectacle designed to elicit fear and repulsion. But the line between scars representing survival and conveying monstrosity is not always obvious. In Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body, Peter Lehman explains how differently cinema typically treats visible scars on men versus women: “a scar on a man’s face frequently enhances rather than detracts from his power, providing a sign that he has been tested in the violent and dangerous world of male action and has survived. He is not easily defeated or killed. He may not be perfect, but he perseveres” (70).  And yet, in horror, a man with significant facial scarring is typically not the hero but the villain. Disability becomes the marker of difference, and, in horror films, difference equates to danger such that a villain must not only be powerful, deadly, and a violator of social behavioral norms, he must also be markedly repulsive (Bones 257-258). In his discussion of how physical difference is often leveraged by the genre to illicit revulsion, Paul K. Longmore notes that physical difference subtly conveys to the audience that they should read the character as subhuman (135). It is this tension between scarring as a visible reminder of survival and as a conduit of revulsion that House of Wax explores through Sue’s screams.

In our first scream, Sue returns to the boarding house and discovers Cathy’s body. As she recoils from the body, she comes face to face with Cathy’s presumed killer.

The framing of the scene in which the camera pans away from Sue inspecting Cathy’s dead body to reveal the killer is still in the room is intentionally ambiguous and leaves the audience to discern Sue’s motivation for screaming. Is it a response to finding the body of her friend and realizing the killer is still there? Or, is it a reaction to the killer’s significantly scarred face? Or perhaps, it is a combination of both? The vagueness of Sue’s response becomes clearer when one considers a subsequent scene and how it radically rewrites the source material. Having escaped the killer after an especially taut chase scene, Sue finds herself at the police station where the following exchange occurs between Sue and the detectives assigned to the case:

Lt. Brennan:                You know, that’s the strangest description I’ve ever heard. No human being can look like that.

Sgt. Shane:                  Are you sure you didn’t imagine it, all of it?

Sue Allen:                    I did see him. Just as I described him to you. He was incredible, but very real.

Lt. Brennan:               And he couldn’t be the same man who took Miss Gray to dinner last night?

Sue Allen:                    No. That’s impossible. She told me before she went to dinner that he was very good-looking.

Sgt. Shane:                  That’s what the landlady said, it’s a man with gray hair.

Here, the killer’s physicality is described without being pathologized. By using the word “incredible” to suggest an appearance deviating from the norm, Sue acknowledges the killer’s physical difference without centering it as a core component of his monstrosity. At no point does she suggest to the audience that the killer’s scars should inspire revulsion. This framing deviates radically from how the 1933 film treats the killer’s scars. In Mystery of the Wax Museum, Florence sees the killer’s scars while investigating the string of murders plaguing the community. There is no scream as she is hiding out of view from the killer and no discovery of the body of a personal friend. Her exchange with the detective is impersonal, racist, and frames the killer’s scars in explicitly marginalizing terms:

Detective:                       Can you give me a description of this person you saw?

Florence Dempsey:      Not a very good one, I guess. It wasn’t like anything human. It hobbled and swayed like a monkey. And the face [scoffs in disgust)]… from the glimpse I got of it was like an African war mask.

Detective:                      You mean he was colored?

Florence Dempsey:     I don’t know. But he made Frankenstein look like a lily!

Unlike Sue’s description, Florence specifically makes note of the killer’s facial difference and uses that as a marker to convey to the detective the extent of the killer’s depravity. It perpetuates the stigmatization of disabilities and contributes to a culture of exclusion and discrimination by assuming a causal link between physical difference and threat, a link it expects the audience to take as a given.

One explanation for the tonal differences between these two scenes might be attributed to audience expectations. As a pre-Code horror film, Mystery of the Wax Museum reflects what Thomas Doherty describes as the era’s fixation “on gruesome imagery and sadistic scenarios built around creatures no longer fully human” (298). In showing her physical distaste for the killer’s scar by visibly shivering while describing them to the detective, Florence is positioning the character as subhuman (Longmore 135). But the remake resists this casting of the villain. For Sue, it is not the killer’s different appearance that raises concern but his actions of swiping bodies from the morgue. With this difference in mind, the scream she releases in the bedroom suggests fright at being in the presence of the killer more than it does revulsion at his appearance.

Henry’s scars represent a worldview shift for the character. Before his disability, Henry was committed to maintaining the highest degree of artistic integrity possible, a position that causes his business partner to set the original museum on fire in order to recoup financial losses sustained as a result of Henry’s unwillingness to deviate from his creative vision. It is only after he has survived the destruction of his life’s work that Henry decides to center his art in titillation and give in to his monstrous urges. To read his scars as a representation of any intrinsic evilness undoes the delicate work being done in the film to portray Henry as inherently sympathetic and driven to madness by the harmful actions of others, a tension showcased in the film’s climactic scream.

Having crept into the museum to confirm her suspicions that the Joan of Arc figure was made using Cathy’s corpse, Sue comes face to face with Henry. When he tries to grab her to take her to the wax room, Sue begins to fight back, cracking Henry’s mask and revealing him to be the murderer. After passing out from the revelation, she awakes to find that she has been strapped nude to a table in preparation for being covered in hot wax.

For as many differences as exist between the 1933 and 1953 films, the revelation scene that artist and killer are one and the same is startlingly similar. Both place the innocent ingenues in the crosshairs of the killer and both rely on the women cracking the artist’s mask in order to reveal his scarred face. The scene is almost shot for shot the same with one noticeable exception: Sue never screams when Henry’s true face is revealed. Unlike the 1933 film in which Charlotte, Florence’s sweet roommate, screams in horror at the artist’s facial disability, Sue simply faints. Similar to the scene in which Cathy’s body is discovered, Sue’s reaction inspires more than one potential reading. Her silence and subsequent collapse could be read as a reaction to Henry’s face post fire but it could also be chalked up to simple shock that Henry is the murderer she has been eluding.

The fact that Henry has been wearing a death mask throughout most of the film is important for the way it reinforces the film’s position that Henry is as much a victim as a perpetrator. A means of capturing a person’s likeness after death, death masks are essentially what Henry is creating when he encases the corpses in wax. The mask he fashions for himself operates in a similar manner to the ones created from the corpses by preserving Henry as he was before the fire. His death may be more symbolic in nature but it still represents a definitive ending for the character. It is a visual reminder that Henry wasn’t born a killer but that he became one after unimaginable suffering. The presence of the death mask is also important for how it connects the narrative to the experiences of soldiers on the frontline. The ‘Masks for Facial Disfigurements Department’ spearheaded by Francis Derwent Wood took significant inspiration from death masks in order to create sculpted masks for soldiers who experienced significant facial damage (Biernoff 677-678). Paraffin wax would be used to “re-contour patients’ faces,” an act that would hold particular resonance for an audience not far removed from the horrors of WW2 (Holland). In a climate where many soldiers were returning home with visible disabilities, Henry’s scars and the mask he uses to obscure them reads very differently. Instead of rendering him subhuman, they make him sympathetic and thus more human. Sue-and by extension the audience– recognizes that disability is not inherently frightening but rather just an aspect of the human experience.

Unlike the original film that uses the artist’s scars for shock value, House of Wax never treats Henry’s facial scarring as a simple spectacle. Neither the mask he fashions nor his scars are demarcated as grotesque. They are simply part of him. Rather, it is his actions that violate the boundaries of normality. Cathy does not scream as the mask comes off because the revelation of Henry’s scars pale in comparison to the shocking admission that not only is Henry’s need for a wheelchair a sham, but he is also the one murdering and desecrating corpses. When Sue does ultimately scream, it is in recognition of the threat Henry poses.

Works Cited

Biernoff, Suzannah. “The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain.” Social History of Medicine, vol. 24, no. 3, 2011, pp. 666-685.

Bones, Paul D. C. “Night of the Living Ableds: Disability, Representation, and Horror Film.” Redefining Disability, edited by Paul D. C. Bones et al., Brill, 2022, pp. 257-265.

Doherty, Thomas. Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930–1934. Columbia University Press, 1999.

Holland, Oscar. “From Ancient Egypt to Beverly Hills: A Brief History of Plastic Surgery.” CNN, 30 May 2021.

House of Wax. Directed by Andre de Toth, performances by Vincent Price, Phyllis Kirk and Carolyn Jones, Warner Bros., 1953.

Lehman, Peter. Running Scared: Masculinity and the Representation of the Male Body. Wayne State University Press, 2007.

Longmore, Paul K. “Screening Stereotypes: Images of Disabled People.” Screening Disability: Essays on Cinema and Disability, 2001, pp. 1-17.