House of Wax 1953
Professor Henry Jarrod (Vincent Price) is a talented wax sculptor who had a wax museum in New York in 1890s. However, Jarrod disagrees with his partner Matthew Burke (Roy Roberts) who proposes to have more sensational wax figures to earn more profits. Unsatisfied with Jarrod’s refusal, Burke sets the museum on fire in order to claim the insurance money. The fire destroys Jarrod’s museum and leaves his face and hands disfigured.
Jarrod rebuilds his wax museum with his assistants, but this time he includes more sensational sculptures to concede to popular taste. He murders Burke and stages his death as a suicide. Then, he kills Burke’s fiancée, Cathy Gray (Carolyn Jones), and uses her corpse as a model of his sculpture. However, the horrifying truth and Jarrod’s disfigured face are discovered by Cathy’s friend, Sue. Jarrod captures Sue and attempts to create his favorite sculpture of Marie Antoinette with her body, but his dreadful action is stopped by the police who learn the truth from Jarrod’s assistant. When Jarrod tries to escape, he is knocked down by the police and falls into the hot melting wax.
House of Wax 2005
The remake has a completely different plot from the original one in 1953. The story begins in 1974 with a backstory of the monstrous killer. A woman is making a wax sculpture while feeding one of her sons, when the father comes in with another son (a disfigured boy) who is kicking and yelling, the mother ties this boy in the highchair, but the boy scratches her hand and is slapped by her.
Then, the main story starts with a group of teenagers going to watch a football game in 2005. They camp in the forest for the night, but they soon find out their car is damaged in the next morning. Therefore, one of the couple, Carly and Wade, visit the nearby town, Ambrose which central feature is the wax museum, to get some help to fix their car. In this ghostly town, they meet the mechanic, Bo, who later to be found out as one of the evil twins turning people into wax in order to make the figures more realistic. The mysterious killer (Bo’s disfigured brother, Vincent who hides under the mask) and Bo hunt down the teenagers while Carly and his brother, Nick, realize these wax figures are real people. When Nick and Carly are chased to the wax museum, they kill Bo and accidentally set the museum on fire. Enraged by his brother’s death, Vincent furiously fights against Nick and Carly, but is stabbed by Carly and died on Bo’s corpse when the house collapses. Only Nick and Carly escape from the murder, and they are rescued by the police in the next morning.
