Classic Movie Review : Thir13en Ghosts (2001)
The endlessly fun things about ghosts movies is that these guys obey no rules whatsoever. If they zero-in on your ass and decide that you're going to have a bad time, you're going to have a bad time. You don't even need to explain anything if you have a ghost in your movie. It can just chill inside the haunted area and pop up for the occasional moment of terror and it's gonna work. Cult classic Thir13en Ghosts does exactly the opposite of that. You love ghosts like I do? This movie a metric fuckton of them.
Thir13en Ghosts tells the story of Arthur Kriticos (Tony Shalhoub), a windower with two kids who inherited his recently departed eccentric uncle (an appropriately evil F. Murray Abraham)’s house. There's something obviously wrong with the place as it looks like it had been designed by a drunk Leonardo Da Vinci. It doesn't take long before a man posing as an electrical worker (nineties wondervillain Matthew Lillard) sells the beans: twelve of the most violent ghosts of all-time are trapped in the basement.
Tony and his kids are kind of also trapped in the house.
The Twin Gods of Splatter and Lore
I never watched Thir13en Ghosts before my viewing for this review and I did understand a thing or two within the first ten minutes. The dialogue in this movie is SO BAD. There is so much unnecessary exposition and garbage you could've made the overall product better by just cutting. Kathy (forgotten glory Shannon Elizabeth) says so much useless stuff. At some point she jumps on one of the best in the house, smiles and yells something like "wow, this bed is so comfortable!" Who the fuck even says that?
Nah, people love this movie for two reasons. First, it has an intricate lore. Folks love to learn about freaky and forbidden things. None of it makes sense, but it's cool and stylist as hell. Why would anyone in their right mind would build a ghost trap that opens a doorway to hell inside their own house? I understand that uncle Cyrus wasn’t in great shape mental health wise, but what the fuck were you even trying to achieve in your madness, you know? Madness was just a convenient excuse in screenwriting then.
Even at the end of Thir13en Ghosts, there are still so many unresolved subplots about the identity of the ghosts and their backstories. I'm not sure why it was cared about so much though? Because people really cared about ghosts having these intricate identities and not just being random ectoplasmic assholes. It's just a neatly wrapped story with a lot of commercial potential. James Gunn apparently made uncredited rewrites to the script, which makes sense. He just didn't want anything to do with that dialogue.
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The other reason why horror audiences love Thir13en Ghosts is because it's violent and campy as all hell. It's crammed with creative kills that are so outlandishly brutal, they will remind you of the Phantasmagoria PC games. Shit, this concept would've worked really well as a third Phantasmagoria. Flying FMV limbs and pixelated blood would've brought the camp element over the top. I mean not only there’s a guy getting cut in half from top down in this movie, but the camera lingers on his insides.
That's pretty fucking cool in the context of a horror movie. I thought it looked even better and gloomier than the top down cut in Takashi Miike's classic of the same year Ichi The Killer. The whole bad dialogue part really feeds in the campiness of Thir13en Ghosts. I wouldn't go as far as claiming it's self-aware, but it gives the characters a gleeful disposability. If you don't form bonds with anyone, all bets are off and that's important in a horror movie. I could've even done with Monk being decapitated or something.
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Thir13en Ghosts is a schlocky movie and I use the term in the most endearing way possible. It's super well-written from a storytelling perspective, but it is executed pretty approximatively. It has more energy and atmosphere than precision and emotion. I get why it was canonized. It's going hard at doing one ambitious thing and it manages to pull it off. Also, it has an underrated rewatchability because it’s short, intense and the thrills are somewhat predictable. I totally get the hype.
