Will Thirteen Ghosts be a baker’s dozen of delightful frights, or an unlucky entry into our horror movie marathon? Will… nope, that’s it. That’s the two things I know about the number 13.
The early 2000’s was a weird time for horror. The mini surge of self-referential teen slashers set in motion by Scream was tapped out, and we hadn’t yet moved on to the torture porn of Eli Roth and the Saw franchise to sate our bloodlust. Without a driving force, scary movies were kind of free to do whatever they wanted. Monk’s Tony Schalhoub could be considered a leading man! Flipmode Squad rapper Rah Digga could be considered comic relief! Mathew Lillard and Shannon Elizabeth could be considered actors! What a time to be alive. Fittingly, Thirteen Ghosts feels like a movie that doesn’t fit into any specific subgenre of horror. It’s technically a ghost story, natch, but it doesn’t play like your typical haunted house movie, even though the house involved is slightly more than a dozen times as haunted as your typical haunted house. The plot involves a successful ghost hunter dying and leaving his vast mansion to his widower nephew and his children. The mansion is a tightly constructed puzzle box of glass walls, gears and mysterious runes, which everyone finds very cool and not suspiciously creepy at all. Unfortunately for Monk, it is not just a home for the living, but a prison for the undead spirits that his uncle has been collecting for some unknown purpose. Not to spoil things for you, but there’s an eentsy chance that the purpose is nefarious. There are nice ghosts and mean ghosts (but mostly mean ghosts) and then some of them accidentally get loose, and voila, a horror movie!
After the setup, the film becomes mostly about Monk trying to save his kids from the ghosts and escape his new home, and a little about solving the mystery of why his uncle didn’t just play Pokémon or something if he had such a hard-on for trapping and enslaving sentient beings. And you know what? Its pretty damn fun. The production design of the mansion is really something else, and the way that the panes of glass slide around blocking and opening new passages functions as a smart tool to create tension and danger. The whole thing really does feel like a giant clockwork mechanism that is performing some mysterious function, and that can’t be an easy effect to pull off. Plus, they borrow a plot device from the great Roddy Piper vehicle, They Live, and give the characters a limited number of spectacles that reveal the horrific spirits lurking around, since they are invisible to the naked eye. Again, another neat touch that opens up the possibilities for the horror set pieces to unfold. The ending is kind of whatever, the big McGuffin machine does something or other related to opening a portal to some kind of eldritch realm, maybe hell, I don’t really remember. It doesn’t matter, though, because the preceding movie is spooky and entertaining and it just breezes by. It is far from perfect, and I wish that we had gotten more backstory for the ghosts*, but this is an underrated little gem that seems to never get brought up in the forums where cult horror flicks are discussed. Maybe that’s because it is divorced from any of the major movements that the genre has experienced over the years, but in my opinion, its novelty is one of its biggest selling points. It’s a perfect little popcorn flick that doesn’t require a lot of thought and is just scary enough to stand out among all the PG-13 Blumhouse drek that has flooded the market in recent years.
*If I recall correctly, the DVD featured little text-based histories for all 13 of the trapped spirits, accompanied by some sketchy artwork. It wasn’t much, but the seeds were there for a full-blown TGCU**. Also, DVD featurettes! Ah the early 2000s.
** Thirteen Ghosts Cinematic Universe, obvs.
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