His rates must be extremely paltry considering he’s the only one there not in on a creepy murder racket, and he must be doubly desperate since his boss doesn’t really like the work he produces. Her fiance, Ralph, works as one of the sculptors at Igor’s new New York museum. It helps that she’s young and beautiful, though that will soon get her into a fair share of trouble. Charlotte is content with living on love if nothing else. Her roommate, Charlotte, disagrees with this pessimistic take on romance. She wants what she wants: if it ain’t a scoop, then it’s a rich hubby who can get her away from the grind. And while she’s a driven amateur detective in her own right, she also can’t be bothered with sentimentality. She’s one of those dames whose heart has been around so much that it’s become calloused. He finds himself up against an unlikely ‘Gallant’: snappy girl reporter Florence Dempsey.įlorence’s ambition isn’t to be the Michelangelo of wax, though. Igor’s ‘Goofus’, relocating to New York after an arsonist fire by a insurance-happy partner leaves his museum wrecked and his body crippled. Reconciling emotional needs with realistic liabilities is a big theme in the movie. By the end of it, he becomes an obsessed monster, too grotesque to fit in his own collection or the rest of humanity at large. Ivan Igor, renowned sculptor, begins the film about to be honored by the British government for his masterful works of art. Mystery of the Wax Museum differs from the usual 30s horror film because its central theme isn’t scientific progress but artistic fulfillment. But these criticisms, often leveled at elitist scientists, were also indirectly nodding at the 1920s elites who promised a great future and found the nation’s livelihood was a creature beyond their control– horrifying and destructive. Frankenstein’s monster and the villain at the core of Doctor X (the other famous pre-Code two-strip technicolor horror film) were both man-made, the extension of immoral science that asked ‘how’ rather than ‘why’. The Universal, Paramount, and Warners horror films all looked at how science, the supernatural, and the darkest parts of the world intersected. By the way, nice sculpture, right? I just love making wax sculptures!”īut going back, way back, to the 1930s, horror films still struggled to uncover the cultural zeitgeist. He’s just… waxing philosophically! Ha, I kill myself. “Don’t worry, folks, I’m sure he’ll get to the pre-Code bits soon. And Evil Dead, about possession and being forced to turn on those you trust in love in order to survive, represents a timeless American horror. And certainly anyone who’s reading this now and has watched horror films go from Evil Dead to Saw to Paranormal Activity and somehow back to Evil Dead in the last 30 years, you can see how our culture has internalized horror and how those movies reflect the world around it– Paranormal Activity is heavily linked with the ‘on all the time’ world of social media while Saw definitely fit right in with the ethos of the Bush administration. Though I was still a pretty impressionable youngster, I think I understood. “People are scared by different things now.” As I watched Dwight Frye stumble about the Gothic castle in near silence, I turned to him and asked, “Did people ever really find this scary?” It was around age 11 when I first sat down to watch the 1931 Dracula with my dad. Mystery of the Wax Museum: The Delighted Corpus Delicti However, the censors demanded the line be removed I’m not sure they know what it means, either, though the implications can let the mind wander into unhealthy territories.
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