Thir13en Ghosts

Infobox Film
name = Thir13en Ghosts


image_size =
caption = Promotional poster
director = Steve Beck
producer = Robert Zemeckis
Gilbert Adler
Joel Silver
writer = Robb White
Neal Marshall Stevens
narrator =
starring = Tony Shalhoub
Embeth Davidtz
Matthew Lillard
Shannon Elizabeth
and
F. Murray Abraham
music =
cinematography =
editing =
distributor = - USA -
Warner Bros.
- non-USA -
Columbia Pictures
released = October 23, 2001
runtime = 91 min.
country =
language = English
budget = $20,000,000 (estimated)
preceded_by =
followed_by =
website = http://13ghosts.warnerbros.com/
amg_id = 1:254895
imdb_id = 0245674

"Thir13en Ghosts" (also known simply as "Thirteen Ghosts" or "13 Ghosts") is a 2001 horror film directed by Steve Beck. It is a remake of the 1960 film of the same name by William Castle. It follows the remake of another one of Castle's films, "House on Haunted Hill".

Plot

In the opening scene, ghost hunter Cyrus Kriticos (F. Murray Abraham) and his assistant Dennis Rafkin (Matthew Lillard) lead a team on a mission to capture a spirit, the Juggernaut, in a junkyard. Several of the men are killed during the ensuing fight, including Cyrus himself when his throat is slashed. However, the team is able to catch the ghost.

The focus shifts to the life of Cyrus' nephew Arthur (Tony Shalhoub), a mathematics teacher whose wife Jean died in a house fire six months earlier. He struggles to make ends meet for his children Kathy (Shannon Elizabeth) and Bobby (Alec Roberts), and nanny Maggie Bess (Rah Digga), but receives a stroke of luck when Ben Moss (J. R. Bourne), Cyrus' lawyer, pays a visit. Cyrus has left his mansion to Arthur in his will.

Dennis, disguised as a power company employee, is waiting for the family when they arrive and enters the mansion along with them. The building, made almost entirely of glass, proves to be filled with priceless artifacts as well as Latin phrases inscribed on the floors and movable walls. Arthur and his family are excited to own it, but Dennis sneaks down to the basement for a closer look. Upon finding several ghosts there, he rushes back upstairs and informs Arthur of Cyrus' ghost-hunting obsession. Twelve spirits have been imprisoned in the basement; the Latin inscriptions are spells to keep them penned in. Arthur initially scoffs at him, but quickly changes his mind when one of the spirits, the Jackal, attacks Kathy. Ben has come with them for a tour of the house, but when he tries to steal a valise full of cash, he trips a mechanism to seal the entrance and release the ghosts one by one. He later encounters one of them, the Angry Princess, and backs up into an open doorway, which snaps shut and slices him in half.

Arthur and Dennis, equipped with special glasses that enable them to see the ghosts, attempt to rescue Kathy and Bobby, who have both mysteriously disappeared. They come across Kalina Oretzia (Embeth Davidtz), a spirit liberator who claims to have entered the house through an opening when it shifted. She saves Arthur, Maggie, and Dennis from the Jackal and explains Cyrus' plans involving the house. It is, she says, a giant machine built for the sole purpose of opening a portal to the "Ocularis Infernum" (Eye of Hell), a demonic device that allows its user to see into the future. It requires the twelve ghosts to do so, one of whom is Arthur's dead wife, Jean. However, if a thirteenth ghost is created through a sacrifice for the sake of pure love, it can act as a fail safe and shut the system down. Arthur realizes that he must become that ghost by dying to save his children.

Cyrus is revealed to be alive, having faked his death in order to lure Arthur to the house, and Kalina turns out to be his secret partner and lover when she knocks Maggie unconscious. He has orchestrated these events, including the abduction of Kathy and Bobby, so that Arthur will become the thirteenth ghost--not to stop the machine as Kalina claimed, but to trigger it. Cyrus then betrays Kalina and crushes her between two glass walls. Arthur and Dennis make another attempt to save Kathy and Bobby with the help of a detached wall. Facing down the Hammer, Dennis pushes Arthur into a corner where he is then protected by the wall, stating, "I've been looking for a reason to like myself for a long time." After a few dodges, Dennis finds himself cornered by the Hammer and the newly released Juggernaut; he takes a brutal beating and dies when the Juggernaut breaks his back.

As Arthur stares at Jean through the glass, all the ghosts disappear from the basement, responding to a tape-recorded summons played by Cyrus. Kathy and Bobby have been placed at the center of a set of whirling, razor-sharp rings, and Arthur is confronted by Cyrus, who tries to force him at knife-point to jump into them. Before he can do so, Maggie discovers the house's control center and destroys the tape, leading to a complete mechanical breakdown. All the ghosts except Jean turn against Cyrus and throw him into the rings, chopping him to pieces. Encouraged by the sudden appearance of Dennis' ghost, Arthur makes a perfectly timed leap over the blades to save his children.

The house's glass walls shatter, releasing the spirits from captivity; Jean lingers briefly to say goodbye to her family, then departs with the others. A fed-up Maggie announces her emphatic resignation in the movie's final line: "This is it for me. I am on the first fuckin' plane back to Newark. Uh-uh. I am sorry, family, Kathy, Bobby, uncle, ghosts. I am sick of this nanny shit. I've had it. This was not in the job description. I QUIT!"

The Ghosts

The twelve ghosts which make up the Black Zodiac all have their own unique back story. Although these stories were not described in the film, on the DVD the production and make-up teams explain their guidelines. All the ghosts were contained in glass prisons. Dennis' psychic abilities and Cyrus' resources are used to catch them. Cyrus narrates each ghost's back story.

1. The First Born Son"(played by Mikhael Speidel)"

The First Born Son is the ghost of Billy Michaels, a boy who was a fan of cowboy films. One day, a neighbor found a real steel arrow in his parents' closet. He challenged Billy to a duel, with Billy using a toy gun. However, his plaything was no match for the arrow, and he died when the neighbor shot it through the back of his head. In death, Billy is in his cowboy suit and holding a tomahawk, with the arrow still protruding from his head.

2. The Torso"(played by Daniel Wesley)"

The Torso is the ghost of a gambler called Jimmy "The Gambler" Gambino. When he bet heavily on a boxing match and lost, he tried to welch on his bet and slip out of town. The mob and the winning boxer, to whom he owed money, caught up with Gambino and cut him into several pieces, wrapping them in cellophane and dumping the corpse into the ocean. His ghost is just his torso, trying to walk around on its hands, while his head lies nearby screaming within the cellophane.

3. The Bound Woman"(played by Laura Mennell)"

The Bound Woman was a cheerleader named Susan LeGrow, who was born privileged and had a penchant for seducing men and tossing them away. This left a long trail of broken hearts. When her boyfriend found her cheating on him before the prom, he strangled her and killed the other boy as well. He buried her body at the 50-yard line of the local football field. The boyfriend was convicted and sentenced to death; before his execution, he was quoted as saying, "The bitch broke my heart, so I broke her neck." Her ghost is in her prom dress, hanging suspended by the strangling implements with her arms tied behind her back.

4. The Withered Lover"(played by Kathryn Anderson)"

The Withered Lover is Jean Kriticos, Arthur's wife. She was burned severely saving her family from a devastating house fire and later died of her wounds in the hospital. Her ghost initially appears in a hospital gown, hooked up to an IV pole and showing severe burns on her face. Unlike the other ghosts, she is not a vengeful spirit, electing to help her family rather than show malevolence. At the end of the movie, she appears fully healed and in her normal clothing.

5. The Torn Prince"(played by Craig Olejnik)"

The Torn Prince is the ghost of Royce Clayton,Born in 1940 who was a gifted baseball star in high school, albeit with attitude issues and a superiority complex. In 1957 he challenged a greaser named Johnny to a drag race, but was killed as his car spun out of control and flipped over; the cause of the accident was a cut brake line. He was buried in a plot of earth that overlooked the baseball diamond. His ghost carries a baseball bat, and in the background in his cube his wrecked car can be seen. Half of his body is torn to shreds from when he was dragged under the car.

6. The Angry Princess"(played by Shawna Loyer)"

The Angry Princess is Dana Newman, who did not believe in her own natural beauty. Abusive boyfriends fueled her low self-esteem, which led to much unneeded plastic surgery for imagined defects. Eventually she got a job working for a plastic surgeon, getting paid in treatments rather than cash. Alone at the clinic one night, she tried to perform surgery on herself, but wound up blinding herself in one eye and permanently mutilating herself beyond saving. She committed suicide in the bathtub by slashing her body repeatedly with a butcher knife. When she was found, people noted that she was as beautiful in death as she had been in life. Her ghost is naked, still carrying the knife she killed herself with and showing all the wounds, and the inside walls of her cube are splattered with her blood. In the edited version shown on T.V., her breasts are shown clear, with the nipples edited out.

In her bathroom scene, the phrase "I'm sorry" is visible on the floor in blood; subtitles also reveal that the blurred, hissing speech that announces her arrival is her whispering "I'm sorry." This was written on her suicide note. When her cube opens, she advances toward Ben Moss, who backs up into an open doorway to get away from her and is killed when it snaps shut on him.

7. The Pilgrimess"(played by Xantha Radley)"

The Pilgrimess is the ghost of Isabella Smith, an Englishwoman who traveled across the Atlantic and settled in New England during colonial times. She was an outsider to the town she moved into, and this isolated her from the other townsfolk. She was found guilty of witchcraft after livestock began to die mysteriously; when she emerged from a burning barn completely unharmed, she was sentenced to the stocks (pillory) with no food or drink until she died. As a ghost, she is still locked into her stocks.

8. & 9. The Great Child and The Dire Mother"(played by C. Ernst Harth and Laurie Soper)"

The Dire Mother is the ghost of Margaret Shelburne, who was an attraction in a carnival due to her being only three feet tall. She was raped by the "Tall Man," another carnival freak. Her son Harold (the Great Child) was born as a result of that rape; he eventually weighed over 300 pounds (136 kg).

Harold, spoiled, was raised as his mother's protector and kept a child-like mindset, to the point that he wore diapers his entire life. One day some of the carnival freaks decided to play a little practical joke on Harold, and kidnapped his mother. Enraged, he set out to look for her, but when he caught up with the culprits, he found that his mother had accidentally suffocated to death in the bag that she was kept in. Harold killed the kidnappers with an ax, keeping their remains and displaying them for paying customers. Later, when the owner of the carnival found out what Harold had done, he ordered a mob of people to tear Harold apart. Their ghosts are always together, and Harold still wields the ax and wears a bib stained with food that his mother has spoon-fed to him.

An alternate version of the story is told in the DVD commentary. It was said that his death was caused by him rolling over on her in sleep and him suffocating her, then him starving to death.

10. The Hammer"(played by Herbert Duncanson)"

The Hammer is the ghost of an African-American blacksmith, George Markley, who lived in a small town in the 1890s. He was wrongfully accused of stealing by a white man from his town, and when threatened with exile, refused to leave town. A gang led by his accuser hanged his wife and children and burned their bodies; in revenge, George used his sledgehammer to beat the culprits to death. He was then subjected to a cruel form of frontier justice by the townsfolk, being chained to a tree and executed by having railroad spikes driven into his body with his own sledgehammer. As a final touch, his hand was cut off and the weapon--handle and all--was attached to the stump. His ghost is seen with the railroad spikes protruding from his body and a sledgehammer for a left hand.

11. The Jackal"(played by Shayne Wyler)"

The Jackal is the ghost of Ryan Kuhn, who was born in 1887 to a prostitute. Ryan had an insatiable lust for women, rape, and murdering prostitutes. Wanting to be cured, he committed himself to Borehamwood Asylum, but after attacking a nurse, he was put in a straitjacket and thrown in a padded room. After years of this imprisonment he went completely insane, scratching at the walls so violently that his fingernails were torn completely off. The doctors kept him permanently bound in his straitjacket, tying it tighter when he acted out, causing his limbs to contort horribly. Still fighting to free himself, Ryan gnawed through the jacket until the doctors finally locked his head in a metal cage and sealed him away in the dark basement cell. There, he grew to hate any kind of human contact, screaming madly and cowering whenever approached. When a fire broke out in the asylum, everyone but Ryan escaped. He chose to stay behind and face the fire. As a ghost, his arms are free from his jacket, and the bars of his cage are ripped outwards, showing that he may have escaped his bindings again sometime before the fire started and that his cage may have heated up enough to where he could have ripped it open before the fire consumed him.

12. The Juggernaut"(played by John DeSantis)"

The Juggernaut is the ghost of a serial killer named Horace "Breaker" Mahoney. Standing seven feet tall, he was of such grotesque height and appearance that everyone ostracized him as a child. His mother abandoned him at birth, so his father raised him - putting him to work in the junkyard crushing old cars. After his father died, Horace was left on his own, and soon went mad. He would pick up female hitchhikers and drive them back to his junkyard, then tear them apart with his bare hands and feed them to his dogs. One day he picked up an undercover female police officer, who called for backup to surround the junkyard. Since close combat was impossible, the police instead struck the yard in force and brought Horace down in a hail of bullets. When he finally went down, they shot an extra magazine into him, just to be safe. His ghost still shows bullet holes all over his clothing, and the wound that finished him. This is the ghost that Cyrus and his team capture in the opening scene.

13. Willing Sacrifice

As a willing human sacrifice (the sacrifice of the broken heart), this is the only ghost to be created out of an act of pure love. Arthur Kriticos prepares himself to become that ghost by giving up his life to save his children. He has been led by Kalina Oretzia to believe that doing so will stop the Eye of Hell from opening, when in fact the thirteenth ghost is needed as the final trigger to start it. Before Cyrus can force Arthur to go through with the plan, Maggie causes a breakdown in the house's control mechanism and all the other ghosts (except for Jean) kill Cyrus.

External links

* [http://13ghosts.warnerbros.com/ Official site]
*imdb title|id=0245674|title=Thir13en Ghosts
*rotten-tomatoes|id=thirteen_ghosts|title=Thir13en Ghosts
*mojo title|id=thirteenghosts|title=Thir13en Ghosts
* [http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/thirteen_ghosts.pdf November 4, 2000 revised draft script] at [http://www.dailyscript.com The Daily Script]