The Mummy attacks.Image via Vestron Pictures
By
Roger Froilan
Published Feb 4, 2026, 8:54 PM EST
Roger is passionate about movies and TV shows, as well as the drive-in theater. Aside from hosting and producing three podcasts and a monthly live show, he also collects comic books, records, VHS tapes, and classic TV Guides. Currently, he's gotten into restoring cars and enjoys many of the shows on the Motortrend channel.
Sign in to your Collider account
Add Us On
Summary
Generate a summary of this story
follow
Follow
followed
Followed
Like
Like
Thread
Log in
Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents:
Try something different:
Show me the facts
Explain it like I’m 5
Give me a lighthearted recap
Some movies don’t just lodge themselves in your memory — they sprawl out and build a little annex, like the oddball friend at a slumber party insisting everyone watch something weird he smuggled from the back shelf of the video store. The breakthrough 1953 film, House of Wax, starring legendary horror star Vincent Price, is one of those films. It sits right beside Tourist Trap, Phantom of the Wax Museum, and even a few stray Night Gallery segments that stuck to your ribs. Those were stories with some weight on them, a little tragedy in the corners, the kind that made you feel like you were stepping into someone else’s private obsession.
But where House of Wax plays like the ballroom version of the genre — velvet curtains, operatic dread, all that tragic grandeur — Waxwork from 1988 kicks the side door open, wearing mismatched shoes and quoting every horror movie it’s ever rented. It’s the punk nephew crashing the fancy family reunion, bringing the spirit of Creepshow, the playful chaos of The Monster Squad, and the anything-goes attitude that fueled late-night Tales from the Darkside reruns. Waxwork doesn’t just riff on its predecessors; it ransacks the attic of horror history and pulls out everything — Dracula, zombies, werewolves, sadistic aristocrats — with the gleeful confidence of a movie that knows exactly what kind of midnight audience it was born to entertain. It’s cinematic mischief, but mischief made with love.
A Museum Where the Exhibits Don’t Just Come to Life, They Swallow You Whole
Zach Galligan prepares to fight the monsters in Waxwork.Image via Vestron Pictures
If you’ve never seen Waxwork, the elevator pitch tells you exactly what kind of ride you’re in for: a group of college kids wanders into a mysterious wax museum that popped up in town like a weed after a rainstorm. The curator — David Warner, doing that sly, half-charmed, half-menacing thing he could do without breaking a sweat — sizes them up with a look that isn’t quite welcoming and definitely not safe. The whole place feels tilted, like someone staged it five minutes before they walked in.
Then the first student steps too close to an exhibit, and the floor drops out. Literally and figuratively. Waxwork’s big trick — and it’s such a good one you can’t even be mad at how bonkers it is — is that each display is a portal. Get too close to Dracula’s dinner table, and suddenly you’re at Dracula’s dinner table for real, with blood on the menu. Wander toward the zombie setup, and suddenly you’re knee-deep in this grimy, George Romero-tinged wasteland that looks like somebody kicked on a fog machine they found in a high-school auditorium closet. Werewolves, mummies, the Marquis de Sade — it’s all crammed in there. This isn’t a museum; it’s a rowdy horror sampler that grabs whoever’s closest.
It’s a concept that shouldn’t feel this fun, but director Anthony Hickox leans hard into the pulpy chaos. He doesn’t tidy the edges or even try to. Waxwork is more mixtape than movie — a heap of genre detours glued together with a wink, a scream, and a bucket of fake blood that probably never quite came out of the carpeting. And somehow, that chaos makes it feel more affectionate than parody.
Where House of Wax Mourns Beauty, Waxwork Throws a Party in Its Ruins
Vincent Price’s House of Wax aches with its own grandeur. It wants you to feel the tragedy behind every glossy sculpture, each one a monument to obsession and heartbreak. You can almost trace the fingerprints in the wax, the way Price plays his madness, like he’s tuning sorrow into a melody. Waxwork, on the other hand, doesn’t mourn anything. It celebrates the carnage. Where House of Wax is cinematic opera, Waxwork is a punk band rattling a garage door. Instead of tragedy, Hickox gives us pure invention — the thrill of letting every monster loose at once and telling the audience, “You’ll keep up, don’t worry.” It’s not elevating horror; it’s reveling in it.
Related
This Forgotten Vincent Price Horror is One of the Few Films Set in This Famously Haunted Landmark
There isn't much cinematic blood spilled in the Bloody Tower.
Posts By Lloyd FarleyAnd the cast knows exactly what kind of sandbox they’re in. David Warner plays the curator like a man who’s read every villain's speech in existence and decided none of them were good enough. It’s camp as performance art. Then there’s Zach Galligan — earnest, a little wide-eyed, almost apologetically sincere — grounding the chaos. He ends up being the one steady presence in the room, the guy awkwardly holding the metaphorical flashlight while everything else whirls and snaps around him.
But Hickox’s real trick is threading that sincerity through all the genre mayhem. He’s not mocking the tropes, he’s creating a hodgepodge of them, similar to how a kid would dump all their toys into a huge pile to see what he could create from various combinations. Each world in the wax scenes reveals warmth, even the goofier ones. You never feel like the movie is punching down at horror. It’s clapping along with it.
A Love Letter Written in Blood, Rubber Masks, and VHS Static
The cast of Waxwork.Image via Vestron Pictures
For anyone who grew up watching late-night horror blocks or spent uncomfortable amounts of time in video stores clutching a tape with a monster on the cover — Waxwork hits like nostalgia with teeth. It carries the DNA of Creepshow, Fright Night, Monster Squad, and every scrappy anthology film that haunted the 2 a.m. schedule of stations too broke to buy better programming.
But it carves its own spot. It’s knowingly silly, but not a spoof. The film respects the styles it barrels through. You can feel the filmmakers winking, sure, but they’re also sweating. Waxwork is handmade horror — scrappy, clever, slightly lopsided, but full of actual pulse. That’s the thing with camp: it’s not laziness. It’s commitment… just with a smirk. And Waxwork commits. Even though it’s one of those films where you can see the seams on the monsters, you don’t mind. They’re unapologetic, and that adds to the charm because you can feel the love from the hand crafters who probably stayed up into the wee hours of the night to get them just right.
Why It Deserves a Spot Beside the Classics
Waxwork earns its cult status, not by being a flawless film, but because it’s not afraid to venture into the bizarre. It’s like that crazy uncle that makes the family cringe when he shows up at family gatherings with dad jokes and a cooler full of mystery sodas, but earns respect from the youngsters with a tattered copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine under his arm. You don’t ask it to behave. You ask it to liven up the night.
Subscribe for Cult-Horror Deep Dives and Genre Picks
Unlock cult-horror deep dives—subscribe to the newsletter for in-depth essays, streaming-ready recommendations, and nostalgic retrospectives on Waxwork, House of Wax, and the midnight films that shaped genre fandom. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime.If House of Wax is your thing — the sweep, the style, the controlled unraveling — save a night for its unruly relative. Dim the room, let the nostalgia buzz a little, and slip into something stranger, bloodier, and way less predictable than anything Vincent Price ever polished for the screen. Sometimes horror works better when it doesn’t try to comb its hair. Sometimes messy is the point. And Waxwork? It’s alive and well.
Waxwork is available to stream on Prime Video and Tubi in the U.S.
Waxwork
Like R Horror Comedy Release Date June 17, 1988 Runtime 95 minutes Director Anthony HickoxCast
See All-
David Warner
-
Michelle Johnson
-
Dana Ashbrook
-
Deborah Foreman
Expand
Collapse
-
House of Wax
-
Horror
Subscribe for Cult-Horror Deep Dives and Genre Picks
Unlock cult-horror deep dives—subscribe to the newsletter for in-depth essays, streaming-ready recommendations, and nostalgic retrospectives on Waxwork, House of Wax, and the midnight films that shaped genre fandom. Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. You can unsubscribe anytime.What To Watch
July 20, 2025
The 72 Best Movies on Netflix Right Now
Trending Now
1:51
30 Steamy Movies to Get You in the Mood on Date Night
7 Years After Being Cancelled, Stephen King’s 20-Episode Masterpiece Just Hit 12.3M+ Hours on Streaming
The 30 Best Movie Franchises of All Time, Ranked
