It must have been easy for Vincent Price to act alarmed in the sequence in which his museum burns down. Right before the shoot, André De Toth's crew set three "spot fires" in strategic locations. Then the cameras started rolling and everything went downhill. The team quickly lost control of their fires, which merged into a massive inferno that put a hole in the sound stage roof and singed Price's eyebrows. But because the rapidly melting wax mannequins would've been very hard to replace, de Toth kept on filming, even as firemen arrived to help extinguish the flames.
Although the film was produced in 3D, ironically, director André De Toth was blind in one eye and hence could not see the effect.
Vincent Price liked to attend screenings of the film incognito. As the thespian once told biographer Joel Eisner, he'd regularly go out and see House of Wax during its run. Happily for Price, the requisite 3D glasses could usually conceal his identity in the back of a dimly lit theater. But one night, he decided to make his presence known. At a showing in New York City, Price quietly took a seat behind two teenagers. Right after a particularly frightening scene, he leaned forward and asked "Did you like it?" In Price's words, "They went right into orbit!"
Nedrick Young, who plays the alcoholic assistant Leon, was uncredited because he had been blacklisted during the Joseph McCarthy "Red scare" era in Hollywood.
Phyllis Kirk tried to turn the film down. Since she was under contract with Warner Bros, she had no choice but to appear in this picture. That didn't stop her from complaining about the gig. "I bitched and moaned and . . . [said] that I wasn't interested in becoming the Fay Wray of my time," Kirk confessed. Another bone of contention was the 3-D format, which she regarded as a "gimmick." However, despite these reservations, she decided that playing ball would be preferable to being suspended. "And incidentally, I went on to have a lot of fun making 'House of Wax'," she admitted.