Vincent Price's 8 Most Entertaining Horror Films

"To you they are wax, but to me, their creator, they live and breathe."

Andre DeToth's remake of the 30s horror classic, The Mystery of the Wax Museum, offers far more than the cheap novelties and gimmicks that made it famous. House of Wax holds a special place in film history as the first colour film released in 3D, but it is also notable as the film that introduced Price as a future horror legend (The Invisible Man Returns being his only other major horror credit by this time, 13 years previously). As good as Lionel Atwill is in the original film, Price unquestionably tops him. It's not difficult to see why audiences swiftly embraced him as the macabre icon that we all know and love today.

A standout moment in this film is a chase scene that, coming from a gimmicky 50s cash-grab, is actually surprisingly terrifying. However, any suspense or genuine chills built in this scene are promptly undone with a distracting intermission sequence featuring a very irritating man launching paddle-balls towards the screen, making full use of the film's pioneering 3D technology. He even turns and directly references the audience at one point: "Well, there's someone with a bag of popcorn!". It's funny for about 5 seconds.

Funnily enough, DeToth was blind in one eye, making him unable to register any of the 3D effects throughout his film. In hindsight, hiring a man unable to see 3D to make the first colour 3D film likely worked to it's advantage; any other filmmaker would have been overly focused on this new technology that the storytelling and tension-building would've certainly taken a backseat. Despite the distracting street performers and can-can girls kicking the audience in the face, House of Wax is a genuinely solid horror film.