Critics despised this 2000s film. Real fans know the truth

Horror is not for everyone. But since the earliest days of cinema, audiences have flocked to get the pants scared off them by on-screen sickos doing terrifying things to people minding their own business in the woods, or an abandoned factory, or an old boathouse, or some other completely normal place to hang out.

And it’s easy to forget, living as we are in this blessed era of prestige horror films, just how bad things got for genre fans early in the 21st century. Today’s horror films are works of art, attracting big stars, critical acclaim and even mainstream awards attention. Think Get Out, Hereditary, Midsommar and The Substance.

Paris Hilton is fine in House of Wax.Credit:

But it was not always like this. Things were dark, and not in a fun way. The mid-2000s was the absolute nadir of horror movies. A conveyer belt churning out near-unwatchable dreck, where cheap jump scares replaced suspense and bad acting was poorly hidden under gallons of fake blood.

Particularly fashionable at the time were seemingly pointless and usually terrible remakes of horror classics. While some reached the lofty heights of so-bad-its-good status, including Nicolas Cage’s memed-into-oblivion remake The Wicker Man (2006), most were entirely forgettable, poorly made snoozefests. Movies including The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), The Amityville Horror (2005) and the Rob Zombie-helmed Halloween (2007) were despised and mocked endlessly for being wooden, uninspired and not at all scary.

Unjustly swept into this morass of critically panned horror remakes of the era was 2005’s House of Wax. A loose reboot of Vincent Price’s 1953 cult classic of the same name, the movie was dismissed at the time as unoriginal and contrived. It also starred Paris Hilton, which didn’t help matters. It was nominated for worst picture at that year’s Razzies and now has a 27 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes. But House of Wax is worth a revisit – it’s the perfect introductory slasher for the uninitiated, and a fun throwback for genre purists.

Plot-wise, House of Wax doesn’t exactly shatter the formula. A bunch of attractive young people are driving through a backwoods American town when their car breaks down.

While they’re waiting, they visit the town’s creepy local tourist trap: the titular wax museum. Cue insanity, as our protagonists meet various grisly ends at the hands of a deranged lunatic. Fin.

But unlike so many of its tired contemporaries, House of Wax benefits from being a competently made movie, seemingly created to entertain its audience, rather than cynically cashing in on the name and reputation of a movie that already exists.

It’s scary, it’s fun, and the production value is surprisingly high. The wax museum setting is legitimately creepy, and there are several frightening and unexpected kill scenes (including one all-time spine-chiller that still haunts my dreams two decades later).

And far from being poorly acted, the cast is stacked. Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray and Jared Padalecki – hot young actors all at the start of what would be successful careers in Hollywood – are fantastic.

Brian Van Holt has the absolute best time as the villain, hamming it up in a dual role that lets him chew the scenery in monstrous fashion. And then, of course, there’s Paris Hilton. It’s easy to forget just how desperately hated by the general population Hilton was in the mid-2000s. It was a lot. But she’s fine in this, and she really doesn’t survive long enough for it to matter.

Most refreshingly, House of Wax has a nostalgic throwback feel to it. It was released at a time of significant change in the landscape of horror cinema, as moviegoers moved away from traditional slashers that had become repetitive, clichéd and obvious.

Instead, the likes of Saw and Hostel ushered in a more extreme, more repugnant, more bloody form of cinematic scares: the so-called “torture porn” style. House of Wax is scary, but it’s fun too. It’s not mean-spirited – there are no excruciatingly long death scenes that revel in the pain of the victims, the characters aren’t trapped in some impossibly hopeless situation.

It’s just a silly, gory, uncynical romp, with a killer soundtrack, a cool setting, some creative kill scenes and a villain who goes super hard. Horror might not be for everyone, but this is the people’s horror movie.

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