24.10.10

House of Wax (2005)


What could be more fun than driving to the biggest college football game of the year in your spiffy Dodge Charger, your group of friends piled in the back, geared up for some sophomoric gallivanting? Stopping on the roadside for a camp-night of teenage debauchery, of course! However, when your sweet ride blows a fan belt you have to run to the nearest town to find a replacement. 


In House of Wax (Silver, Zemeckis, & Levin, 2005 -- yes, the one with Paris Hilton, we promise it's still worth watching!), two teens catch a lift with the local road kill collector to Ambrose, a small dusty, out-of-the-way place, searching for the fan belt that stands between them and the ‘big game’. Our protagonists peruse the seemingly deserted town looking for a local mechanic; they find instead a self-proclaimed famous “Wax Museum”. Curious figures stare back at the confused teens as they explore the unknown artful treasures. It is not long before they find out they have entered a staged town-of-wax, created and maintained by a deranged set of brothers as a shrine to their dead parents. The teens find themselves perpetually fooled by the very realistic yet mechanically-driven movements of cleverly placed decoys lining the streets and peering out of living room windows. 


Interestingly, the detection of living things (i.e. animacy detection) is a very hot topic in research laboratories world-wide. People are remarkably adept at perceiving human movement, even when there is no real human form present (huh?! see what we mean HERE). Human attention is highly sensitive to the motion of living things—or things that appear alive (e.g., very life-like wax figures moving in a humanistic way, and even simple geometric shapes moving in certain patterns; see Morito et al., 2009). Under day-to-day circumstances, this mechanism for detecting living things affords us an evolutionary advantage, making us sensitive to potential threats lurking in the shadows. This skill ensures we are better equipped to identify a deranged maniac, stalking us with the intention of coating our bodies in hot wax. However, this sensitivity can also misfire, and we can be easily duped by even moderately lifelike imitations, as the teens in House of Wax are horrified to discover.


Check out House of Wax (2005) here:

References:
Silver, J., Zemecksi, R., & Levin, S. (Producers), Collet-Serra, J. (Director). (2005). House of Wax [Motion picture]. United States & Australia: WanerBros. Pictures & Village Roadshow Pictures.
Morito, Y., Tanabe, H.C., Kochiyama, Y., & Sadato, N. (2009). Neural representation of animacy in the early visual areas: A functional MRI study. Brain Research Bulletin, 79, 271-280.


1 comment:

  1. Sounds like this movie makes good use of the uncanny valley.

    Also, while I was looking for a cute uncanny valley link, I stumbled across this.

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