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House of Wax in our magazines

THE MOVIE: House of Wax

THE STARS:
Elisha Cuthbert • Chad Michael Murray • Paris Hilton
DIRECTOR: Jaume Collet-Serra

THE CONCEPT:
Re-imaging of the 1953 Horror classic. A group of friends, on their way to a college football game, decide to camp out for the night. A couple of them end up in the small town of Ambrose, where the main attraction is Trudy’s House of Wax, filled with remarkably life-like wax sculptures – but there is a shocking reason the exhibits look so real…

U.S. RELEASE: May 6 2005, Nationwide • Rated: R

THE COMMENTS:

JOEL SILVER (producer):
“This is a fun Horror movie. You want the audience to scream and close their eyes, but not so much out of eeriness, but out of shock. To me, the final reel is pretty intense.”

ELISHA CUTHBERT (Carly):
“I think your best work comes out of challenging yourself. The scream was the hardest for me. I think to get a really good scream it has to come from a real place. I don’t think you can just go, ‘Oh my God, I’m scared,’ and scream. I think you have to really frighten yourself, and whatever that fear that’s really deep inside comes out, something happens in the scream. I was really pleased with mine because I felt I really wanted to go there with it.”

CHAD MICHAEL MURRAY (Nick):
“I particularly like Horror films like Night of the Living Dead, and the original ’54 version of Vincent Price’s House of Wax. But our movie is completely different. We took liberties. We contemporized it just a bit, but it’s fun, you can go in and sit down and get a few scares, and then go home.”

PARIS HILTON (Paige):
“I saw the movie two days ago, and I’m glad I saw it before the premiere because I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat. I was screaming and covering my eyes because it was so gross. If I did that at the premiere, I’d be so embarrassed.”

JAUME COLLET-SERRA:
“The special effects people did a great job. They went for every combination of wax, and all things that look like wax. I melted a lot of candles, trying to analyze how it breaks down. The idea is, the end of the movie, the last reel, happens inside of a candle. That’s the idea. We all know what it looks like, but it’s very difficult to accomplish that.”

CUTHBERT:
“It’s scary for me to watch the film. I watch it and I think, I was there and I know this happened, but you can never underestimate the power of editing, the idea that all of these things get cut together and you think, wow, this is incredible. There were moments when I jumped, and I thought, ‘God I’m a loser. I jumped at my own movie.’”

MURRAY:
“Wax is not easy to move around in, so it was definitely physically enduring. When I read the script I thought to myself, ‘How the hell are we going to pull this off?’ And then I went, ‘Well, Joel will do it, he’s the man.’ And we did it!”

Written by Judy Sloane. Back to top

Visit the official House of Wax site
Images above © Warner Brothers Pictures
Feature © 2005 Visual Imagination Limited.
Not for reproduction.

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