There has long been a relationship between horror cinema and the humble waxwork museum. 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. 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.
When cinema emerged, this offered new opportunities to appal and repel its audiences, but there was overlap between the old scares and the new. 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. There was also overlap in the sense that waxwork museums themselves appeared on film. 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. Other horrors have continued to reference waxworks and exhibitions of this grisly nature, even if not featuring them outright. 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.
“Stop on by…”
But 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. 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. It’s ambitious, it’s novel – and it’s such fun.
Looking every inch an 80s movie – which itself has a nostalgic charm – Waxwork gives us a bunch of college kids who are variously unlucky in love, virginal, massively wealthy and terminally privileged, and it seems at first that it’s going to be really difficult to empathise with them – but writer/director Anthony Hickox achieves it. This isn’t Society (1989) and the purpose of the film isn’t to roast the rich – these kids are just of a type, and they want to have fun. When a wax museum mysteriously pops up in the middle of their neighbourhood, and the owner (David Warner!) invites a select gathering of their friends to come along at midnight, of course they want to go. They’re a little surprised, and they think that the whole thing is perhaps a little old-fashioned coming in what they refer to as “the video age”, but it turns out the museum has its charms. It also has something distinctly weird going on – and as the show begins, the visitors begin to disappear – one by one. Can the survivors uncover what is going on before they, too, fall prey?
“This…is…killer!”
The nature of each waxwork tableau is significant. Each functioning as a distinct story (and I’d honestly have happily seen each and any of them turned into a film of their own) the waxworks feature a panoply of entertainment and horror film archetypes: there are circus acts, historical murders, Gothic fantasies and a whole host of famous monsters. In the first sequence, the werewolf story even references Universal’s take on the werewolf myth, using the ubiquitous silver bullets which were the invention of the 1930s script. Later on, we come up against mummies, vampires, zombies, even the Phantom of the Opera: the whole film is a love-letter to both old and new horror, with a cast of older actors, several of whom, like Patrick Macnee, had long worked in horror cinema, featuring alongside new actors like Zach Galligan – fresh out of the hit kiddie horror Gremlins, and forever associated with this decade in film.
The different ways that Waxwork achieves its novel approach are just as interesting. Firstly, each ‘participant’ who enters their own waxwork scene seems to assume, at least at first, that they’re taking part in some kind of show. They speak directly to an assumed narrator, guessing that they’re being watched or directed in some sense. Also, each participant joins in with their scene in character: once the story-line starts, no one challenges the other characters or asks where they are. They simply perform as they believe they’re meant to, right down to a bit of casual cannibalism, or a heavy whipping (the film has a few erotic sequences for its female characters, including a ‘noteworthy’ rendezvous with the Marquis de Sade).
Then, those horror stories which reach a conclusion turn from movies back into tableaux. The moment of death becomes frozen in time, forming the chamber of horrors scene, and making the ongoing relationship between waxworks and cinema very clear. In trying to decipher what is going on in this museum, Mark (Galligan) eventually works out that you have to believe in the phenomena in order to be harmed by them. Characters cross their own fourth wall, then turn back into static figures. it’s both very modern, and very traditional in this sense – whilst never losing its sense of humour, from the diminutive doorman Hans’ incomprehensible whiplash bows (!) to its self-effacing dialogue throughout.
“They’ll make a movie about anything nowadays.”
If you thought the early phases of this movie had a lot going on, then the end of the film is even busier, to the extent that Wilfred’s explanation of what the hell has been going on here is delightfully mad. To add to the vampires and the lycanthropes, we get a liberal dose of black magic, topped off with voodoo, and all of this apparently engineered to bring about the end of the world, no less! As an homage to so much of the horror which had come before it, Waxwork is borderline exhausting; the finale is basically a horror brawl, shot through with some more pretty good creature FX and masses of blood spray. It’s an OTT conclusion which perfectly suits the approach taken throughout the film, and keeps the entertainment factor high.
Waxwork has stood up to the test of time pretty well, and I’d say it’s Anthony Hickox’s best and most original piece of work – not bad going, considering this was his first ever feature, shot before he had turned thirty. It has that time capsule quality which we can enjoy on its own merits, but its charms run deeper than that. As an 80s film, it came at a point in horror history where there was already a wealth of work to reflect back on. Waxwork is aware of its place in the horror canon, it knows its stuff, and accordingly it’s able to play with some of the expectations 80s audiences would already have had of the genre. However, it also comes at a time which is still largely non-cynical; there’s no eye-rolling here. Waxwork is as experimental as it is deferential, but its experiments are done with glee. Because it’s a film that is clearly not bored by itself, it’s never boring to watch, and I wish we could say the same for more of the eye-rolling films which have followed in its footsteps.