Once upon a time, there was a man named William Castle. And when William Castle was 13 years old, he saw Bela Lugosi on stage in a theatrical production of Dracula. He fell in love with being scared, and he devoted the rest of his life to scaring the pants off America. And those are William Castle's words, not mine. Castle was also equal parts marketing genius and inveterate huckster. He would devise fantastic schemes to kind of differentiate the horror pictures that he was making from those of his competitors. He created Emerge-O and Percept-O and Illusion-O. He sold life insurance policies to patrons in case they were to die of fright while watching one of his movies. He sent Joan Crawford on the road with an axe to promote another one. And he employed these techniques in classics like The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler, Mr. Sardonicus, Straightjacket, I Saw What You Did, Homicidal, and 13 Ghosts, all of which he also produced and directed.
Eight years after 13 Ghosts, he produced Rosemary's Baby. Nine years after he produced Rosemary's Baby, he was dead at the age of 63. And 11 years later, after he died, some guys you might have heard of named Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gil Adler formed Dark Castle Entertainment. Their goal was to remake classic Castle films, which they gave up after tackling only The House on Haunted Hill and this one, Thirt13en Ghosts, before they switched gears to produce original films, both within and without the horror genre, like Ghost Ship, Gothika with Halle Berry, the Orphan films, they did As Above, So Below, and then things like The Loft and Splice, they did Guy Ritchie's RocknRolla, as well as some non-Castle horror remakes like House of Wax with Paris Hilton.
When this movie came out in October of 2001, just in time for Halloween, and bearing in mind that the World Trade Center had just fallen a little over a month before, I think I was having my first sort of jaunt out of the city since before 9/11. My friend Allison and I took the Chinatown bus to visit our friend Brian just outside of Boston. Brian's birthday is on Halloween. I was dressed as a devil. There is a fantastic picture of me snorting a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup in full devil regalia at some party saying, “There's no wrong way to eat a Reese's.”
But it was that weekend that we also saw Dark Castle's remake of William Castle's 13 Ghosts. And I thought it had a fabulous production design and an inexplicably spelled title that made me nervous that I wasn't gonna be able to find it to rewatch it for this conversation tonight. Thirt13en Ghosts is a really unconventional haunted house movie. And it's also one of a handful of late 90s to sort of mid 2000s genre films that collide ideas of the supernatural and technology. As with this film, we have seen recorded incantations unloosing their magics from Evil Dead onward. We also discussed The Legend of Hell House recently, which pits machine against (used to be) living man. Dark Castle's House on Haunted Hill remake two years prior also relied upon some high-tech supernatural scares too. And of course at this time the flourishing of the internet was resulting in things like Fear dot com. And the kind of tech and horror collision also includes things like The Ring and Pulse and Saw and continues to be explored in films like Unfriended. I should also point out that no opening credit sequence has perhaps ever made me happier than Thirt13en Ghosts when the phrase “Introducing Rah Digga” fades into view. Other than maybe in Blood Orgy of the She Devils, which has a credit line in the opening crawl that reads, “Ambulance furnished by…”
But when Thirt13en Ghosts opens, I think it has a distinctly sort of 80s to early-90s vibe, because it starts with a junkyard scene, which could be my second favorite kind of scene in a horror film following a microfiche sequence. Freddy Krueger is brought back to life when a dog named Jason literally pisses fire on his unmarked junkyard grave in A Nightmare on Elm Street 4. A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 has a junkyard scene. Stephen King's Christine is located principally in and around a junkyard. Salvage, Wrong Turn, Bloody Birthday. The Town that Dreaded Sundown, I could go on. Dan Aykroyd's Nothing But Trouble has a junkyard scene. Halloween Ends has a junkyard scene because “yay, nostalgia.” But it is into this junkyard that Academy Award winner F. Murray Abraham steps from out of a Duesenberg dressed like he's going to the opera ready to absolve mediocrities everywhere, while a truck filled with blood and hoses and stuff starts chumming the scene like a mobile Shining elevator We get our first hint at how the house that we haven't seen yet is going to operate, and this is minute three of the film. It already looks big, it looks shiny, it looks expensive. It looks like there must be a big sign in the Dark Castle reception area that says “Go big or go home,” because it keeps getting bigger. They built a glass walled somewhat functional set of Uncle Cyrus's trick house in a studio and they shot it for real. And it, thus the house becomes not only a character, but it becomes probably the most compelling character in the film.
And when we'redropped into the narrative proper at the Kriticos’ apartment, they've just lost their house and their mother in a fire. And either they had no insurance or mom was apparently like a studio executive with a shopping addiction and a gambling habit and a real thing for booger sugar level breadwinner. Because it's like six months later and they're out of coin and they're living in a shabby apartment that's decorated with all the books and an entire shelf of mismatched drinkware straight from the goodwill, But Cvrus's house is just extraordinary design. It reinvents the haunted house with an eye toward a kind of eclecticism and steampunk and creates a new idea that's like a deadly wunderkammer invented by John Dee.
I think what I appreciate most about this movie is that the filmmakers are clearly in love with what they're doing. And they even seem to be trying to create a unique mythology for this film. There are strict and binding ghost laws. They created the Arcanum, the book that all of the instructions come from. We get references to Basileus and a black zodiac of unholy archetypes. We get a phalanx of spirits who were created with sort of fairly elaborately detailed backstories. And we have the invention of the best infernal machine.
This machine, to quote Kalina, was designed by the devil and powered by the dead. And I think it's the best one since the lament configuration in Hellraiser. And I think all of these ideas, frankly, could have launched an entire franchise of its own, they were really channeled directly into the kind of practical effects and creature designs that bring this story to life. And they are, I think, aided in no small amount by the really game assistance of a pretty competent acting company that features known quantities in its cast from F. Murray Abraham to Tony Shalhoub and Embeth Davidtz and J.R. Byrne, who we remember from The Exorcism of Emily Rose last season, Scream’s Matthew Lillard, Shannon Elizabeth (who is just okay), and a totally natural and delightful acting debut from one Rah Digga.
The film looks great. It's well-paced. It's well-shot. The cinematography, especially given the technical challenges of shooting inside a glass box. And the editing is fast and aims to knock audiences over in the most kind of MTV way possible, with nearly subliminal imagery and the very real possibility of epileptic seizures. The filmmakers chose to jettison nearly all of the outrageously juicy backstory development for the thirteen ghosts in favor of probably a more breathless sprint to the finish line. I think the screenwriting is efficient and effective and delivers exposition naturally in a couple of very welcome scenes. There are like quadruple crosses in the plot.
This is a movie about ghosts, yes. It's a movie about a haunted house, sure. But this is also a movie that features greed as the sort of literal engine of the story. When Moss collects his filthy lucre, the mechanics of the house are engaged, and the rest of the story of the film is kind of put into motion. And then Moss eventually gets his comeuppance as he's backing away from a woman he's just objectified and dies effectively by mammography. And I think it's a very feminist ending for him, but not a feminine ending.
But I would say that like horror films are supposed to do, at that point in our collective cultural and political experience, on or around Halloween in or near Boston in the bosom of two of my best college chums, sitting there in the dark in October 2001, Thirt13en Ghosts Ghosts kind of made me feel sort of like it was in the before times. It was so commonplace just to be able to go and sit in a movie theater and watch a movie like you could two months before.
To listen to our episode on Thirt13en Ghosts, click here.
Bradford Louryk