20 years since House of Wax was released, this ugly piece of history still crops up

With buckets of gore, a killer soundtrack, and a star-studded cast, 2005’s House of Wax remains a beloved slasher film 20 years on.

Directed by Orphan and The Shallows creator Jaume Collet-Serra, it was a remake of the 1953 film of the same name, itself a remake of the 1933 film Mystery of the Wax Museum.

Starring Elisha Cuthbert, Chad Michael Murray, Brian Van Holt, Paris Hilton,and Jared Padalecki among others, a group of college friends en route to a football game become stranded in a ghost town when they get a flat tire.

They seek help in the only place that’s open in Ambrose – an impossibly creepy, seemingly abandoned wax museum.

As they explore the terrifying property and the chilling works of ‘art’ on display, they soon discover all is not what it seems (of course, what else would you expect entering a creepy building in an almost abandoned town) as they are hunted by twin brothers Bo and Vincent (Van Holt in a dual role) who run the museum.

House of Wax is filled with brutal kills, but none more vicious than that sustained by Hilton’s character Paige, who is chased to the town’s sugar mill and impaled on a metal pole by Vincent.

In fact, the socialite’s onscreen death was a large part of the film’s marketing campaign, urging potential viewers to ‘See Paris Die’ in morbid promotional materials.

Though the team behind the film assured audiences it was a tongue-in-cheek slogan, the villainisation of leading ladies deemed ‘love to hate them’ personalities in the public eye is a terrible trend horror cinema can’t shake as House of Wax marks its 20th anniversary.

Despite receiving mostly negative reviews, the film still amassed $70 million (£52.7 million) worldwide thanks to its viral marketing campaign, with the focus placed entirely on Paige’s grisly death.

The 2000s saw Hilton shoot to unprecedented heights of stardom, becoming the focus of several tabloid articles thanks to her party lifestyle and celebrity friends, which only intensified with the release of a sex tape featuring her in 2003.

At the time of her casting, she was starring in the wildly popular reality TV show The Simple Life with Nicole Richie, which was a huge draw for audiences alongside 24’s Cuthbert, One Tree Hill’s Murray, and Gilmore Girls’ Padalecki.

But many slammed Hilton as being famous simply for being famous, and her mere existence in the public eye drew vitriolic hate from many, with the twisted ‘See Paris Die’ campaign appeasing the masses who wanted nothing more than to tear her down.

The hatred didn’t end when the credits rolled, with Hilton receiving a barrage of criticism and negative reviews for her performance, which also led to her receiving a Razzie for Worst Supporting Actress.

Sure, the quality of Hilton’s performance in House of Wax is debatable, but jibes were levied toward the star before the film had even hit cinema screens, showing that this negativity wasn’t solely based on her acting chops.

Speaking to Entertainment Tonight recently, Hilton described her death scene as ‘iconic’, continuing: ‘People always talk about it as one of the most iconic scenes ever in a horror film. So, it makes me really proud that that film has just really stood the test of time.’

But this same legacy is tainted by the terrible treatment of Hilton by horror fans simply for not fitting the mould of what many may expect from an actor, and an almost scolding approach to her personal life that isn’t applied to Hollywood A-listers deemed more ‘worthy’ of these roles.

Two years later, fellow it girl Lindsay Lohan appeared in I Know Who Killed Me, a much-loathed slasher that has gone on to garner a cult following.

The year in which the film was made saw Lohan check into the Wonderland Center rehabilitation facility after her high-profile party girl lifestyle and trouble with the law ‘caught up with her.’

As such, much of the coverage of I Know Who Killed Me revolved around Lohan’s personal life, and as she fell from stardom, every film she appeared in drew criticism from the masses simply due to the turning tides of her public perception.

I Know Who Killed Me bombed at the box office and was trashed by critics, mostly focusing on Lohan’s performance, which has since been praised as a dark gem in her filmography and strangely reflective of her real-life struggles with fame.

In 2009, history repeated itself once more when Jennifer’s Body, starring Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried, hit the big screen, telling the story of the titular high school student who becomes a succubus following a botched sacrificial ritual.

Despite the feminist narrative covering everything from violence against women and girls, to toxic masculinity and Queer relationships, the marketing for Jennifer’s Body focused on one thing – Fox’s sex appeal.

Posters featured Jennifer scantily clad in a school uniform or a cheerleading outfit, and much of the promotional material around Jennifer’s Body drew attention to one scene in the film that saw Fox and Seyfried kiss.

Jennifer’s Body has become a cult classic praised for its important themes, but at the time, the marketing missed the film’s target audience and led to negative reviews, most of which were aimed at Fox, who had become a sex symbol following her stint in the Transformers franchise and felt constantly objectified by the media.

Her performance was phenomenal, but as the film’s leading lady and a popular figure at the time, attracting plenty of headlines, the brunt of the backlash was aimed squarely at her, leaving Fox feeling ‘vilified.’

She told CinemaBlend: ‘I was being vilified a little bit when the movie was getting ready for its release, it was that interesting juxtaposition to shooting up to extreme heights of fame right before the movie was released and then… the tearing me down was starting to happen. Then I had this media fallout with someone I worked with in the industry.

‘That happened right when I was on the press tour for Jennifer’s Body. I think it all sort of exploded at once. I felt people definitely viewed me as negative or having bad intentions or just being really shallow and selfish, if it could be reduced and simplified even down to that.’

Fox went as far as to say that the hatred she faced and the constant objectification she experienced at the time of Jennifer’s Body’s release almost led to a ‘total breakdown’ and her stepping back from the public eye.

It’s not just the 00s rife with this behaviour, with Kim Kardashian facing accusations of ‘ruining’ American Horror Story simply for being cast, long before any episodes had even aired.

The Kardashian empire is well-known, with the reality TV family known across the globe and often described as the world’s most famous family.

Like Hilton, she was hit by intense backlash when a sex tape featuring the Skims businesswoman and Ray J was released in 2007, and she hasn’t been far from headlines since, whether it be down to drama within her family, her ex-husband Kanye West, or her 2016 Paris robbery.

Last year, Kardashian was cast in the 12th season of American Horror Story, titled Delicate, as Siobhan Corbyn, a publicist hired by protagonist Anna (Emma Roberts) who supports her through her IVF treatments, pregnancy, Oscar campaign, and career woes when scandal hits.

Her character was eerily like her own ‘momager’, Kris Jenner, and Kardashian played the role expertly with enough charisma, sass, and terror to make her a standout of the season in what was her acting debut.

But even before the season aired, many slated the programme for even considering casting the Keeping Up With The Kardashians star solely because of how she achieved fame, without considering her potential acting talents.

In the same year, Sydney Sweeney’s appearance became an unusual political symbol around the release of body horror film Immaculate with some social media users claiming her rise to fame marked an end to ‘wokeness.’

Why? She is a conventionally attractive blonde who occasionally shows off her sizable chest in low-cut dresses.

While this isn’t the same rampant negativity that Hilton, Lohan, and Kardashian faced, it still acts to show how horror’s leading ladies are reduced to bodies to be objectified, whether its using their violent onscreen deaths as marketting fodder, or discussing their bodies in a vulgar manner as if they’re not even human beings.

It’s not just the horror genre that sees the personal lives and perceptions of its stars affect a movie. Our obsession with celebrity culture often means that the world of showbiz and art collide.

But our inability to detach these real-life humans from the characters they play, coupled with salacious headlines and our parasocial relationship with stars, means that celebrities face frightening reactions that could well lead to devastating consequences as we have seen time and time again.

That’s not to say people in the public eye can’t be criticised, it’s important to hold people with a platform to account when need be, but to levy such hatred towards people struggling with addiction, intimate material leaked without their consent, or simply for being famous seems a waste of time and energy that could be spent toward causes that justify it.

If we mark the 25th anniversary of House of Wax with anything, it needs to be leaving the poor treatment of horror’s leading ladies behind and judging a performance for exactly what it is without a star’s celebrity status and personal life clouding our vision.

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