Model Friends: Monstrous Control in “House of Wax”
Village Roadshow
Last month on Cinemacabre, I wrote about how much of a sap I am and how bad I am at saying goodbyes. This means that I saved most of my packing for the last minute and I’ve since left North Carolina for Massachusetts, my home state. On the drive back, I passed familiar monuments: bridges, megachurches, strange auction houses; a giant Marlboro cigarette towering over the highway, Baltimore’s Domino Sugars sign all demarcating past trips. I felt like I was hitting rewind on different periods of my life. Reaching Massachusetts, I had to hit eject, return the tape.
I’d somehow missed House of Wax until a conversation with some of the No Contact team a year ago. I’m a sucker for––and squeamish during––slasher movies, preferring the magical ilk of Nightmare on Elm Street and categorically rejecting the likes of Saw. When a friend and I started Hostel years ago and someone’s Achilles got slashed, we agreed we’d reached our limit and switched to lighter fare.
My sister and I settled on House of Wax, expecting a dumb but fun teen horror movie. The film opens with a graphic scene of parents tying their sons down in their highchairs for breakfast. A wax face falls to the floor, suddenly reminding me of a Halloween episode of Popular Mechanics for Kids when they cast molds of their faces. My sister and I loved the show growing up, learning about pop science, the centripetal force.
So, we were tickled when the movie jumped years into the future, to college kids talking about the football game they were road-tripping to, some grade-A expositional dialogue, and we realized that our protagonist, Carly, was played by none other than Elisha Cuthbert, PMK host, grown-up.
On every level, the film fired nostalgic cylinders: the costumes, the music, a cast of mid-aughts idols in this group of soon-to-be-endangered friends––Jared Padalecki, Chad Michael Murray, and, of course, Paris Hilton. They scan through a dated car GPS to find a shortcut to the game, which leads them astray, causing them to camp for a night in a field, recording their drinking and making out on a digital camcorder. Watching them, I felt old. 2005 suddenly looked––and sounded––like so long ago.
House of Wax follows the slasher formula almost to the letter. A group of partying young people gets lost on a road trip. A creepy truck bathes their debauchery in its headlights, so Carly’s rebellious twin Nick (Chad Michael Murray) shatters it with a ball. In the morning, Carly (Elisha Cuthbert) stumbles into a carcass pit in the woods, the source of a mysterious stink, and another pick-up truck stops to add a dead deer to the carnage. Carly and her boyfriend Wade (Jared Padalecki) hitch a ride with this backwoods man into the nearby village of Ambrose to pick up a new fan belt (their car has been mysteriously damaged during the night). At every juncture, I noticed the Florida license plates, the anxiety they feel in approaching the small town with this man. This is the South that horror loves to inhabit, all too easy to imagine on screen and project our northerly anxieties.
Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween, House of Wax is upfront about where the horror lives, in this occult wax museum. Carly and Wade wander through the house, furniture chintzy and molded as fondant, nonplussed when none of the wax figures are of famous people. Who could these figures be?
Everything in the movie points to the obvious answer: the wax figures are previous victims of this slasher trap, shot with jets of wax, dead or alive, depending on the killer’s appetite. The twins pass through town and realize everything has been dolled up. At the movie theater, wax figures watch What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? They spectate the Miss Ambrose beauty pageant and line the pews of the church for Miss Trudy’s funeral. Once Nick rescues Carly from a gas station basement, she remembers that a woman has pulled the curtain from the window, spying on her movements through town. When they sneak up to the glass, they find her rigging––an animatronic––nothing left behind her glassy eyes.
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When I was leaving Wilmington, a friend said she wished she could keep all her friends in her closet. I’ve always been a collector, holding onto unexpected mementos in an attempt to hold the past.
With each goodbye, I could feel the impulse to hold on, how nice it would be to bring this friend wherever I go next. Traditions help us mark endings, move on. Driving away alone, passing my familiar spectacles along the roads of southeast North Carolina and 95, I knew the place, the friendships would remain. This just wasn’t a drive I’d have to do again soon. The sugar sign and cigarette saw me off.
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House of Wax comes on the heels of twenty years of slasher franchises. To the formula, it adds the grisly taste of Saw or Final Destination––nobody is magically sucked into their bed, but their finger might get snapped off. Most often in slashers, the Final Girl must journey through the killer’s terrible place, encountering the corpses of her murdered friends before arming herself for final combat. Though Carly and Nick do eventually find their friends’ bodies, they spend most of their time examining the figures of previous victims, camouflaging themselves among the models, joining the crowd while they’re still living. There’s a grotesque stillness to every figure. Preserving their bodies after the killing, House of Wax seems to ask what’s been taken from the victims of slasher movies past? Why do we watch the gore and freeze the unsuspecting in time?
As slasher movies do, Nick and Carly’s fight to survive draws them into the belly of the killer brothers’ past. Together, brothers Bo and Vincent have built a community of their own, one populated with neighbors who can’t run away when they get to know their monstrous tendencies. In Ambrose, everybody knows them, they set the rules. Nobody from the outside ever comes in and returns home. In the end, the killers’ house catches fire and melts into a molten pool. Under heat, their model cannot hold, the illusion of control dissolves around their feet.
