William Castle is remembered, if at all, as a man who made many schlocky horror movies with a lot of gimmicks to get butts into seats. If it a horror movie made for metaphorical peanuts had a crazy gimmick attached, Castle at least inspired the idea if he didn’t outright make it. Then to my surprise, I actually watched one of his movies and found it was quite enjoyable. The man had some genuine talent and he knew how to make a movie like that work. Some of his better known work has been remade in recent years to varying levels of success, and the 2001 horror movie Thirteen Ghosts was one such remake from production company Dark Castle Entertainment, a company that takes William Castle’s work at least as an inspiration.
As far as gimmicks go, I don’t know if this movie was released in 3D, but it sure did at times look like the sort of movie that was. I guess I just had to settle for watching it on my HD set.
After an opening scene that shows adventurer Cyrus Kritocs (F Murray Abraham) working to seemingly catch a rather violent ghost in a junk yard before dying in the process, the movie cuts to the main character, recent widower Arthur (Tony Shalhoub), a man deep in debt after a fire destroyed his home and led to the death of his wife. In the meantime, he has two kids, teenage daughter Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth) and young son Bobby (Alec Roberts), plus live-in babysitter Maggie (Rah Digga). However, an estate lawyer arrives to tell Arthur that, as Cyrus was his uncle and he is the only surviving member of the family, he has inherited a glass house out in a secluded area. Needing money as he does, the family goes to check it out, meeting a man, Dennis Rafkin (Matthew Lillard), just outside the house claiming to be from the power company when they arrive. But the house is, as expected, not what it seems as it was built to contain a number of ghosts within the walls, twelve in total, and Uncle Cyrus may have had some plans of his own involving his surviving family, the ghosts, and a ritual that the house’s built-in mechanisms seem designed to set off. Some of the ghosts are rather harmless, but the rest? That’s another story.
By the by, no, I do not know how a man with as much debt as Arthur has can afford a live-in babysitter, or why anyone would want to move into a house with glass walls since, you know, no privacy, but these aren’t the sort of questions a movie like Thirteen Ghosts should provoke since, well, they aren’t really addressed. This is a popcorn flick, not all that scary as horror movies go, but then again, maybe it doesn’t have to be.
Indeed, that is the strength of Thirteen Ghosts: its production design and direction. The ghosts all look unique and freaky, and director Steve Beck does some neat camera tricks. The opening credits are set as a continuous pan from a window in a circle around Arthur’s home, showing a “before and after” form of storytelling, showing first the two kids and Arthur’s wife hanging around in a lush backyard while Arthur watches contentedly before panning around the rest of the room, gradually showing the scene get darker and gloomier until the camera returns to Arthur, now alone and looking miserable. It is the sort of sequence that effectively tells the audience everything we really need to know about Arthur as a character without lots of exposition. Likewise, the movie does a good job of using Lillard’s general onscreen oddness, a skill that often comes across as obnoxious, by showing a character who has a really good reason to be the way he is, and because he is that way, it makes other characters less inclined to trust him even if they should. Are actors like Shalhoub and Abraham overqualified for a movie like this? Absolutely, but that doesn’t make it any less fun.
If anything, there are a lot of hints here that there is way more going on with the backstory of, oh, everything in the house than is revealed in the film. Various DVD extras actually gave backstories to each of the twelve ghosts, stories that are at best only hinted at in the movie itself. Would it have been nice to have included such details? Sure, but it would have likely ground the movie to a halt, and even if many of the ghosts are actually harmless, they sure don’t look it. Thirteen Ghosts may not be the best haunted house movie ever made, and it was panned heavily by critics, but as a fun little oddity, one that pays some homage to the William Castle original as the characters need special glasses to even see the ghosts. It is essentially just a bit of mindless fun that probably shouldn’t be thought about too hard but can be admired for a movie that, considering the genre, did clearly put a lot of thought into what it was if nothing else.
Grade: B-
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