Trainwreck or Classic? Thirteen Ghosts (2001)

My wife and I loved Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and after looking through James Gunn’s filmography we found he was one of the writers of the 2001 horror movie Thirteen Ghosts. Visually stunning but considered a commercial flop, let’s see if Thirteen Ghosts still chills after more than 20 years.

This is going to be a relatively spoiler-free plot, for two main reasons: there’s very few unexpected twists and there’s even less plot. The film follows that Arthur Kriticos, broke and grieving the loss of his wife in a fire, who lives in a tiny apartment with his son, daughter and “wise-cracking” nanny. Within their future looking bleak, the family leaps at the chance to collect on the will of Arthur’s eccentric uncle Cyrus, who died and left his nephew a house made of glass. When the family arrive, they find themselves trapped in a house with 12 angry ghosts and an infernal machine, which will kill them all unless they can escape. Along for the ride is Cyrus’s psychic assistant Dennis, and the “I’m totally not going to betray you, really” ghost hunter Kalina. It ends about as well as you can expect.

Despite some big names attached to the production, the acting in this film is awful. The exception is Matthew Lillard as the psychic Dennis, who is genuinely giving it his all in every scene. The dialogue doesn’t fare much better, rarely revealing character and barely even moving the plot along. I suppose there’s only so many variations of “Ahh! A Ghost!” that you can come up with when there’s a dozen of the damn things spread across the movie.   

As for the plot, it’s a very paint-by-numbers jump scare setup, the Arthur and his family running from ghosts only to run into other ghosts. The problem is that none of the plot points are character-driven. You could have literally replaced the Kriticos family with the Scooby gang and the plot would have largely played out largely the same way. Actually, I would watch the hell out of that movie, especially as Matthew Lillard went on to play Norville “Shaggy” Rogers in Scooby-Doo the following year.

The plot problem is reflected in the Deus ex Machina of the film’s ending, which fits the Infernal Machine that powers the haunted glass house. My wife and I went back over the film’s ending, and we realised that if Arthur stood in a corner for the entire Third Act, literally nothing would have changed. Character-wise it’s the same. Apart from a brief touching moment where Arthur gets to say goodbye to the spirit of his deceased wife, no-one develops because of the film. The characters are still broke, unhappy and probably now traumatised against visiting any house with shiny surfaces…

The editing and camerawork is very choppy – there’s too much sights and sounds, it clutters up the tension. The exception is a fantastic scene where Arthur’s daughter doesn’t know she’s sharing a bathroom with a blood-stained ghost, but the rest of the film is a rushed busywork of jump scares and near escapes.

What most people remember about this film is the glass house itself, which even after all these years is a visually stunning gothic-steampunk museum where every glass surface is covered in Latin inscriptions. Credit where credit’s due, this is one of the best “jar” sets I’ve ever seen. I also loved the ghosts, even if the sheer number of them was overwhelming. Each is disturbing and distinct and conveys a little horror backstory in their visuals alone. Modern horror has tended towards very “samey” ghosts lately, and the wild, exaggerated, designs of the glass house’s denizens really grabs you.

While I doubt James Gunn is going to be putting this trainwreck at the top of his resume, Thirteen Ghosts is worth a re-watch if you’re a fan of lavish set design and bad acting. If you have any other daggy ghosts stories you’d like me to watch, please leave a comment below, cheers! 


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