It’s ambitious, it’s novel – and it’s such fun. Whilst sharing some plot features with House of Wax, Waxwork also runs stories within stories, eventually pitching these stories against the world as we know it. “Stop on by…”īut in the 80s – a whole thirty years ago, to be precise – a film used the theme of the waxwork museum as its central plot device not only that, but it was one of the first truly self-referential horror films, doing far more than simply utilising the waxwork museum as a straightforwardly scary setting. House of 1000 Corpses sees the Firefly family turning their victims into exhibits even Hostel references doing the same thing, demonstrating the terrific reach of the chamber of horrors, even if, unfortunately, only a few still exist today. Other horrors have continued to reference waxworks and exhibitions of this grisly nature, even if not featuring them outright. The House of Wax told the story of a demented artist (the one and only Vincent Price) who wanted to repopulate his wax museum with real bodies – in a link to the wax museum’s historical legacy, his chamber of horrors features Marie Antoinette, whose modelled decapitated head was one of the most popular exhibits in the Caverne des Grands Voleurs, and later in Madame Tussauds, too. There was also overlap in the sense that waxwork museums themselves appeared on film. Early cinema often took its cues from the same source material – the legend of Sweeney Todd, for instance – and often presented its most shocking fare as tableaux which wouldn’t look out of place in a chamber of horrors. When cinema emerged, this offered new opportunities to appal and repel its audiences, but there was overlap between the old scares and the new. Taking her cues from the new buzz in Paris, Madame instituted a similar exhibition of her own in London which soon proved to be massively popular: this great success was integral in spawning a thousand other chambers of horror around the world, oddities which aimed to satiate people’s morbid curiosity about infamous murderers or horrific events, back in the days when the best you could hope for along those lines was the odd illustrated Penny Dreadful or low-brow newspaper. Though now sadly fallen out of favour, waxworks were a de rigeur form of entertainment before cinema existed the world-famous Madame Tussauds opened its first ‘chamber of horrors’ in 1802 after the successes of the French ‘Caverne des Grands Voleurs’, which had made a pastime out of exhibiting wax figures of famous victims – and leaders – of the French Revolution. There has long been a relationship between horror cinema and the humble waxwork museum.
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