6/22/2023 0 Comments Waxworks museumIn 1953, when 3-D movies were as much of a novelty as color was in the early 1930s, Warner remade Mystery of the Wax Museum as House of Wax. Her stunned pause before she screams is retained in the finished film. ![]() Wray recounted to numerous interviewers how director Michael Curtiz shot the scene before she had ever seen the burn makeup, and how she simply froze on camera when confronting it for the first time. His greatest creation has been his own wax image-underneath the mask is a hideously scarred visage. She strikes him in the face and is stunned when his features crack away. The film’s most famous scene shows Atwill, rising from his wheelchair and perfectly able to walk, advancing on Wray and telling her how he plans to re-create his Marie Antoinette by embalming her in wax, preserving her beauty forever. Charlotte’s roommate, Florence Dempsey (Glenda Farrell), a wisecracking reporter, notices that Igor’s sculpture of Joan of Arc bears a startling resemblance to another woman named Joan-a recent suicide whose body was stolen from the morgue-and starts to smell a story. When he meets Charlotte Duncan (Wray), the girlfriend of his studio assistant, he immediately sees the image of his most beloved lost creation, a statue of Marie Antoinette, and becomes obsessed with her. But Igor somehow survives, now in a wheelchair, and twelve years later he reappears in New York City with a new exhibit, this one calibrated to appeal to morbid popular taste with scenes of murder, torture, and execution. His business partner sets fire to the premises to collect insurance money, leaving the sculptor to die in the flames. Ivan Igor (Atwill) is a talented waxworks artist committed to elevating his craft into a respected art form, but his museum is failing badly because he refuses to pander to public taste by installing the obligatory horror exhibits. The heightened realism worked the same magic on audiences as did wax figures-the more lifelike the illusion, the more riveting it became. īoth films were shot in two-strip Technicolor, a film process that effectively suggested a full-color image without actually requiring that one be entirely created (a similar, cost-saving process was already well-established in magazine illustration and printing). The formula performed well enough at the box office that the same actors were immediately assigned to Mystery of the Wax Museum. Warners produced Doctor X, based on a hit Broadway horror play, casting Lionel Atwill, Fay Wray, and Arthur Edmund Carewe. But on the whole, horror still seemed a good bet. Hyde and Island of Lost Souls, while MGM had failed to capitalize on the horror craze with Tod Browning’s gamble, Freaks, which backfired badly, repelling audiences and critics with its display of real human deformity. Paramount had already scored considerable success with Dr. ![]() acquired the rights to the play at the height of Hollywood’s 1931–1932 lucrative “monsterfication,” led by Universal. He rebuilds his exhibit with embalmed corpses coated in wax. ![]() Belden, author of an unproduced play called The Wax Museum, in which he imagined a sculptor named Ivan Igor who survives a similar conflagration hideously disfigured and mentally unhinged. The incident stuck in the mind of one playwright, Charles S. The world’s most famous wax museum was Madame Tussaud’s in London, which made headlines in 1925 when it was spectacularly destroyed by fire. The main attraction was often a Chamber of Horrors that re-created historical atrocities as well as tabloid tableaux of gruesome modern crimes. It is in horror movies that this pervading sense of the uncanny still speaks to us.īefore movies, people went to wax museums to experience a pleasurable shudder in the presence of human replicas. Some early commentators on the medium worried that film might be nothing less than the arrival of living death. ![]() Motion pictures are another way to create duplicate people that originally had a palpably creepy edge. If one self is killed, the other will survive. According to psychoanalysts like Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank, perfect human simulacra, or doppelgängers, arise spontaneously in the primal imagination as defense mechanisms against danger and death. There is a good reason that doubles, dolls, and effigies of all kinds figure prominently in horror stories. Available from Running Press, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. FRIGHT FAVORITES: MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM His victims died … but he preserved their beauty forever in wax.Įxcerpted from FRIGHT FAVORITES: 31 Movies to Haunt Your Halloween and Beyond by David J.
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