Our association of waxworks with the macabre also would seem to have to do with their historical use as funeral effigies. Jarel schooling her waxworks apprentice in The Old Curiosity Shop In particular, we hear more about the public’s hunger for murderers and how that is best accommodated. We hear a passage from that and several more from an obscure 1896 non-fiction work containing a trove of information on the waxwork business in 19th-century England: Joe Smith and his Waxworks. Salmon” whose work illustrating some rather bizarre legends was shown on Fleet Street, a popular 18th/19th-century location for waxworks exhibitors once they had graduated from installing traveling displays at Fairs.Ĭharles Dickens gives us a taste of the life of traveling waxworks exhibitors in his 1840 novel The Old Curiosity Shop, which features and impresario named Mrs. We have a look at some earlier innovators, including a “Mrs. Tussaud was by no means to the first to display waxworks or even waxwork horrors in England. The Victorian’s fascination with murder and executions discussed in our “ Gallows” and “ Gibbet” episodes was enthusiastically exploited by Tussaud, and we hear some amusing details and contemporary criticism of all this from the magazine Punch. His “Den of Thieves” became the “Chamber of Horrors” central to Tussaud’s fame in London and later the world. In 1804, when Tussaud accepted an invitation to display waxworks in London (and was later prevented from returning to France by the Napoleonic Wars), she brought with her Curtius’ concept of a discrete room dedicated to the infamous.
When Revolutionaries don’t have real heads, wax will do. This could be particularly gruesome work given the empathy Tussaud had developed with contacts at the court, as we hear in a grim passage from Tussaud’s Memoirs, read by Mrs. This meant crafting likenesses of heads that tumbled from the guillotine, to be carried on pikes or displayed on trophies. When the Revolution broke out, Tussaud and Curtius were called upon to demonstrate anti-royalist sympathies by documenting the Revolution’s victories. Through the Prince’s connections, Curtius and Tussaud entered elite circles, including the court at Versailles, this thanks to Louis XVI’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, who sought out Tussaud as a mentor to help her create religious figurines in wax. Her move to France came when the Prince of Conti invited Curtius, his assistant and domestic to join an artistic circle he sponsored in Paris. Her story begins, however, not in France, but in Switzerland, where as a child she began assisting the wax modeler Philippe Curtius, whom her mother served as housekeeper. Naturally, this brings us to a central figure in our story, Madame (Marie) Tussaud, whose name has become synonymous with waxworks. All of these have historic roots reaching far beyond their cinematic iterations.Ī final commonality is the presence of waxworks murderers and representations of historic villains and villainy, with a particular emphasis on the French Revolution. Offering a few more comments on horror films in this genre, we note some common themes: wax figures created over human remains, waxworks as uncanny, liminal presences, neither living nor dead (though being alive enough to kill you), and madness or death awaiting one who accepts the challenge to overnight in a wax museum. It happened to be a remake of 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum, coincidentally another technological pioneer thanks to the film’s use of Technicolor’s early 2-color process. The most famous example, 1953’s House of Wax, not only created Vincent Price as a horror actor, but pioneered the use of 3D. We begin with a brief look at wax museums in horror cinema (going back to 1907). The macabre feelings stirred by waxwork figures go far beyond their use in horror films, back to the Terror of the French Revolution, and beyond to their use as funeral effigies and in magic rites of popular Italian Catholicism and Roman-Etruscan witchcraft.
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