Acquaint yourself with the first 3D movie screened in the United States

CAIRO – 11 April 2022: On April 10, 1953, the horror film "House of Wax," starring Vincent Price and produced by the Warner Bros Pictures Inc, premiered at the Paramount Theater in New York.

"House of Wax" was the first major studio film to be shot using 3D or stereoscopic technologies and one of the first horror films to be shot in color.

Directed by André De Toth, the film tells the story of Henry Jarrod (Price), a sculptor who goes crazy after his partner burns a wax museum to the ground in order to collect insurance payments. Jarrod survived the fire and later opened his own wax museum, which included an exhibition memorializing past and present crimes, including the murder of his ex-partner by a mysterious, disfigured killer.

The film's heroine, played by Phyllis Kirk, discovers that Jarrod himself is the killer, and that the museum's "sculptures" are all the wax-covered corpses of his victims, according to History.

The 3D imaging process involved the use of two cameras, or a dual-lens camera, to represent both the left and right eyes of the human viewer, then the images from the two cameras were simultaneously displayed on the screen.

Movie-goers had to watch the movie through special stereoscopic glasses to see its full 3D effect. The lenses were specially tinted so that the viewer sees images of the right and left eye only with the two eyes assigned to them. 

3D technology proves particularly effective during the film's climax stalking scene, in which the undercover killer pursues Kirk through a series of gas-lit alleys, with the viewer following behind.