The Cellar's Elisha Cuthbert reveals she literally glued her lips together for House Of Wax
Cuthbert also talked about her time in The Midnight Society for Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
We weren’t especially big fans of The Cellar, Brendan Muldowney’s new feature-length adaptation of his own short horror film The Ten Steps. (More scope, and more mythology, are rarely a good substitute for the sheer gut punch of the horrifying unknown.) That being said, we can’t deny that star Elisha Cuthbert is a highlight of the film, or that she’s put in her time in the spooky movie trenches—something she reflected on in a recent Bloody Disgusting interview promoting the new film.
Cuthbert—who’s been acting since she was a teenager—started by looking back at her time as a member of The Midnight Society on Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid Of The Dark?, which she joined in 1999 when the show was rebooted (for the first time) with a second generation of campfire storytellers. “It felt like kids camp,” she recounts, talking about weeks of filming in the show’s artificial, indoor forest and its semi-real campfire. “As actors we really felt like we were those society kids.”
Cuthbert then went on to talk about what’s probably her most high-profile horror role: Serving as the protagonist of Jaume Collet-Serra’s 2005 remake of House Of Wax. Cuthbert heaped praise on the film’s look and production design, noting, “That whole town was built out in Australia for I don’t even know how much money. But that was a real legit town that was built out of wax. The façade itself. I couldn’t believe it.”
And then we get to the good, harrowing stuff, a.k.a., the joys of some very practical effects:
We couldn’t figure out how to do the lip gluing without making it look ridiculous. I had to be strained and fighting for my life, but I had to somehow find a way to keep my mouth pried closed. So it just wasn’t working and I finally said to the prop guys, ‘Just get the glue. Just get the real glue.’ So we ended up really gluing my lips – not with crazy glue, but with something very similar. So I could not pry them apart. There was no real other way to do it, without it looking silly. So we went for it.
So, yes: Thank you for that instant mental claustrophobia, Elisha Cuthbert.