‹ Back

(Deep Cuts) HOUSE OF WAX (2005) & the Millennial Crash Out of the Mid-2000s

By. Bee Delores 

A Huffington Post piece from 2019 opens with this cutting line: “Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past.” Writer Michael Hobbes laments the pressure bearing down on millennials since the mid-2000s financial recession, drawing lines through various points in time, from the foundation of American Dream propaganda of the 1950s through the birth of the Boomers to modern day. It’s an upsetting timeline that Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2005 slasher remake HOUSE OF WAX eerily predicted.

The film, which takes cues from Mystery of the Wax Museum, the first remake released in 1953, and later, 1979’s Tourist Trap, follows a group of 20-somethings – Carly (Elisha Cuthbert), Nick (Chad Michael Murray), Paige (Paris Holton), Blake (Robert Ri'chard), and Dalton (Jon Abrahams) – when they go on a cross-country road trip to a football game. They’re hopeful that everything will work out, unaware of the dangers ahead. They were promised safe travels, but they ended up victims of a machine. Only Carly and her brother Nick slither out of the clutches of evil (i.e., the crumbling financial foundation of the United States) and burn the system to the ground.

Since 2008, millennials have been forced to constantly move the goalposts of success, delaying buying a house (if at all) and having kids (if at all) when their Boomer parents were set way before they even turned 30. The oldest millennial turns 44 this year, and the future looks grimmer than ever. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to posit that millennials will never own property, forever at the mercy of landlords and the housing crisis.

Horror has long transformed familiar spaces into reflections of larger anxieties. Read our essay on THE BACKROOMS, where an endless maze becomes a powerful metaphor for trauma, isolation, and the stories we tell ourselves.

In HOUSE OF WAX, Carly and her friends make their first grave mistake early on: they camp out in a random field for the night. While they sleep, an unknown man breaks the fan belt in Wade’s car. That means they’re stranded, so Wade and Carly head to a nearby town. A grungy-haired, slimy-smelling man named Lester (Damon Herriman) offers them a ride, which they reluctantly accept. Lester is an oddball, to say the least. His strange behavior is certainly cause for concern, making him the red herring of the film. Carly and Wade quickly get the heebie-jeebies and ask to be let out along the side of the road. They’ll venture across the washed-out road on their own. Despite their encounter with Lester and the stream intersecting their path, Carly and Wade venture further into the unknown.

With the future looming like a dark cloud over a haunted house, millennials have taken a similar journey and opted “out of traditional milestones, with a growing share choosing to remain childfree, freelance, or pursue purpose-driven careers over climbing corporate ladders,” a very recent MSN report stated. Increasing resentment over inheriting a failed system from Boomers permeates much of the online conversation. 

 

Viral TikToker Levi McCachen said it best: “One of the reasons they specifically lack empathy for young people these days is because they think they’re also financially struggling,” McCachen said about the Boomer generation. “They’re like, inflation is up, I might not be able to take as many vacations as I want this year.”

He then noted the vast difference among millennials and Gen Z with this hypothetical: “Whereas millennials and Gen Z are like, this cheese I bought is covered in mold but if I throw it out and buy new cheese, I might not be able to afford rent this month, so I’m just going to cut the edges off to get to the fresh cheese and then make myself a bread and cheese sandwich while I sell feet pics online so I can I afford to pay my car insurance.”

Carly and Wade soon enter the town of Ambrose, barren streets littered only with soft, flickering amber light dotting the way into the abyss. Not a single person is spotted along the lonely streets, only cold echoes bouncing off the storefronts. It’s certainly not dissimilar to reality in 2007 when the economy took a modest downturn before crashing out completely. “It steepened sharply in the fall of 2008 as stresses in financial markets reached their climax,” Federal Reserve History notes, before adding that unemployment doubled from five to 10 percent. The ramifications continue to be felt today.

As they wind through the town, eventually ending up at a supposed funeral at the end of the block, Carly and Wade meet the preacher and gas station attendant Bo (Brian Van Holt). Bo is dashing, and honestly, he’s quite a hunk. Nothing, in particular, seems off about him. While he finishes up the funeral service, Carly and Wade head up to Trudy's House of Wax and poke around the various sculptures. Everything is made of wax, even the walls, the ceiling, and the floors.

Much like the house of wax precariously standing high on a hill, the economic system of the United States promised things to millennials that it just never followed through on–turning the golden calf into a golden wax figure of a calf. HOUSE OF WAX comes to an appropriately fiery end. When it’s “revealed” that Vincent is actually Bo’s brother, the showdown happens inside the wax museum, which has now caught fire. Carly and Nick fight for their lives, staving off Vincent’s advances while also trying to survive the building’s slow melting. Carly beats Bo to death with a baseball bat, and later, Vincent is stabbed in the back and falls to his death into the all-consuming flames. Carly and Nick barely escape… The following morning, the cops arrive and survey the scene. The film’s twist comes when the cops reveal that there was a third brother in the family: Lester, who waves to Carly and Nick as they drive away.

It’s ultimately a tragic end, even though Carly and Nick live. The one economic establishment might have been decimated, but there’s always another popping up in its place. It’s easy to write HOUSE OF WAX off as a silly slasher of the remake age. Still, it’s a prescient time capsule that not only serves as a reminder that millennials really did inherit a broken system, but also remains a warning about the future. Things are never as hopeful and promising as they seem. And they never were.

HOUSE OF WAX didn't arrive in a vacuum. It was part of Dark Castle Entertainment's ambitious attempt to reinvent horror for a new generation. Continue the conversation with Pleatherface's Deep Cuts essay Dark Castle...The Art of Remaking Versus the Lack of Creativity, an exploration of the studio's remake philosophy, its legacy, and why these films deserve another look.