13 Ghosts (1960)

               These days the name William Castle almost refers more to a concept than a person. In the popular consciousness he kind of encompasses all the wily, slightly shady film producers who wheeled and dealed with the various independent cinema owners of the 50’s and 60’s to get their non-studio films booked and in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Castle is kind of the sanitized version of the archetype, since generally his films were simple monster movies or thrillers with a distinct lack of nudity or gore. He was contemporaneous of but very distinct from similar producers like Herschell Gordon Lewis, of ‘Blood Feast’ and ‘2,000 Maniacs’ fame, or Roger Corman, who kind of built his own studio system. Before the consolidation of the theaters into large chains a smart producer could book any number of theaters with a killer title and a slick poster, then use that money to actually make the movie. The reason genre films seemed to whipsaw around for a couple of decades, from nudies to monsters to gore to thrillers to hippy stuff, is because it all directly tracked from the feedback theater owners were getting from their teenage clientele.

              Castle is such a fun character because of his endless parade of gimmicks. Unlike a lot of other such producers, who would use the notoriety of the content of their films as their own advertising (such as 1967’s ‘Teenage Mother,’ which boasted the tagline “The film that dares to explain what most parents can't.”), Castle came up with a seemingly endless parade of dumb publicity ideas. In 1959’s ‘The Tingler’ the titular monster killed people by latching on to their spinal cords, so he had little electric buzzers placed on random people’s seats to give them a jolt in sync with the monster’s attacks in the movie. In ‘Mr. Sardonicus’ the audience could vote on which of two different endings would be shown, death or mercy. That sort of thing.

              In ’13 Ghosts’ it was “Illusion-O,” a variation on the usual 3D colored glasses. Since there’s a quasi-magic set of ghost spectacles in the movie, whenever a character would put them on the film’s color would shift from pure black and white to shaded blue, except for the ghosts which were shaded red. Audiences were handed two pairs of glasses with colored cellophane lenses, one pair blue and one red. If you were “chicken” you could wear the blue lenses and thus not see the ghosts at all, if you wore the red lenses the ghosts would be even more intense. This really doesn’t translate outside of the theatrical experience; most home video releases have just included the ghost footage in black and white, although I’ve also seen a blu-ray version that keeps the tinting. I can’t speak to how well the experience worked in the theater but watching it now the ghost segments just grind everything to a halt while the terrible effects take over.

The effects aren't ... seamless.

              Castle wrote and directed the movie himself, and since this is my first Castle movie I really had no idea what to expect. Luckily my first reaction is one of pleasant surprise since the dialogue and scene construction aren’t terrible. There’s not a whole lot to this movie but the character motivations are well established, the relationships between people are clearly delineated, the only character I don’t like is the villain, and all of the people I do like get happy endings. Nobody falls off a cliff and most of the movie isn’t spent waiting for the various people who know the backstory to dribble it out to everyone else. The direction is simple and standard, just a couple of steps up from tv dramas of the time, but aside from the ghost segments everything is paced pretty well.

              The only actor of much note is the child actor who got top billing, Charles Herbert as Arther “Buck” Zorba. Interesting that the family at the center of the movie is Greek and it’s never really mentioned, I guess good job the 60’s? He was very popular at the time, in fact Castle only secured him by promising that top billing, but a couple of years after this he started to age up and his career completely evaporated. His isn’t a new story, child actors have been treated terribly by the industry for decades, but it’s interesting to run into someone up there in popularity with Tommy Kirk or Bill Mumy that I’ve never heard of. It’s pretty depressing to wonder just how many other discarded child actors are out there and how many I’ve seen in movies like this without ever knowing what happened to them.

              Oh, I tell a lie. There’s also Margarent Hamilton, of Oz fame, who plays Elaine Zacharides, the spooky house’s housekeeper with a mysterious past. That’s worth a note. I wish they didn’t make quite so many witch references with her, but by all accounts she was comfortable with her legacy in later life, and at least she was working.

              The movie opens solidly. We’re introduced to Donald Woods as Cyrus Zorba, leading a tour of the LA Museum and explaining the history of the tar pits. He gets called away to take a phone call from his wife, Hilda, played by Rosemary DeCamp, who tersely informs him that their furniture is being repossessed. Again. He’s a little surprised and vague on the details of their money, at which she is completely unsurprised. That night they have a little birthday party on the floor for their youngest, Buck. His older sister Medea, played by Jo Morrow, mercilessly teases him throughout, and it’s kind of nice to see a scene that’s doing more than one thing at a time. We’re meeting the family, getting their dynamics, establishing that Buck has a thing for ghost stories and spooky stuff in general, and we’re also getting the details of their financial situation, all through their dialogue. They’re clearly broke despite Cyrus’ museum job, but the family is also pretty close and happy despite that, clearly having gotten used to making the best of it. The scene pre-answers a lot of questions the audience is soon going to have about why they’re putting up with a house full of so many ghosts.

              Buck makes a wish to live in a house with furniture nobody could take away and a spooky breeze blows out his birthday candles. There’s a buzz at the door and a spooky man is there with a telegram from a local lawyer, Benjamin Rush, played by Martin Milner. The go to see him the next day and it turns out they’ve just inherited a mansion, furniture and all, from Cyrus’ rich uncle Plato Zorba. He was an eccentric genius and the lawyer grimly informs them that he collected ghosts from all over the world and kept them in his house. He also hands over a box with the magic ghost spectacles in them. A fake fly clearly on a string buzzes around them for a few seconds before landing on the glasses and instantly dying in a huge spark. Good stuff.

              The family of course moves right into the house. Various bits of the will come to light over the next few scenes, ticking off questions the audience might have. Turns out that Plato liquidated all his funds into cash but nobody knows where the money is, which is the central mystery the movie eventually turns to. If the family doesn’t live in the house it goes to the state, so they couldn’t sell it even if they wanted to. It doesn’t come with the aforementioned Margaret Hamilton, and it’s established that the family explained that they couldn’t pay her, but she’s agreed to work for room and board while she looks for a job elsewhere. It’s not perfect but it does explain why the family stays when the ghosts show up: they’re broke and they don’t have anywhere else to go.

              At around 17 minutes in the movie has a Ouija board scene, a good thirteen years before ‘The Exorcist.’ Slightly less of a box office phenomenon, this one, so I understand the lack of accompanying hysteria around it. The session goes wrong, with the board very directly stating that there sure are ghosts in the house (12 of them to be exact, they’re threatening to have 13) and that one of the family is going to die. The planchette them floats over to point at the sister Medea, although she’s never really threatened in the movie so I don’t know what’s going on there. A huge framed painting tips off the wall and smashes right down onto the board, not really coming close to anyone but it's relatively shocking. The picture is back on the wall, perfectly fine, for the rest of the movie, by the way.

              The next forty-five minutes are just rotating instances of the Illusion-O gimmick being used over and over. I should explain, during these scenes they overlay semi-transparent footage of the ‘ghosts.’ The worst is the kitchen, where a guy clearly dressed in a black bodysuit with white shorts and a chef hat on and with a clearly cardboard white mustache stuck to his face mimes taking a butcher knife to another couple of people also in black bodysuits. Without the colored glasses it’s clearly just people in costumes overlaid on the actual footage. They also hold on the scenes for way too long. At one point Cyrus wanders down into a hidden lab, puts on the glasses for no real reason, then recoils from random skellingtons and ghouls and a whirling something of fire for a solid two minutes. That’s a long time to see things on strings being jerked around. There’s also a section where Buck grabs the ghost glasses off of a coffee table, which is obviously where you store such things, wanders around with them in one hand without ever putting them on, which is certainly how kids work, then eventually finds himself in the basement poking around an old chest once owned by a lion tamer. So now a ghost lion and ghost headless lion tamer show up to kind of be in the same shots as the kid for a good three minutes. It does end with a decent joke as Buck spends the next few scenes telling everyone he just saw a lion and gets blown off.

I mean ....

              Eventually the ghost shenanigans cause Cyrus to discover a switch in Plato’s old bed that lowers the canopy down to the mattress. It’s been established that Plato died in bed of apparent suffocation, by the way. I’ll address how stupid all this is in due time. The family learns that, rather than just a housekeeper, Elaine was Plato’s assistant and fully versed in all the spooky goings on. The ghost stuff seems to escalate when a zombie apparently shows up in Madea’s room. This is eventually revealed to be the lawyer, spoilers he’s the bad guy, which doesn’t really make sense by the end, but we’re moving on. They decide to hold a full séance to contact Plato and ask him what the heck is going on. Around this time Buck discovers Plato’s hidden fortune when he’s messing around with the stairs. Benjamin the lawyer happens upon him at this very moment and instantly flips from friendly and charming to deeply skeevy. He gets Buck to promise not to tell the rest of the family until tomorrow when it’ll be a big surprise. For the past few scenes he’d been pitching the rest of the family on schemes to get them out of the house, clearly intent on finding the money, and this is his big chance.

              The séance happens and Plato possesses Cyrus briefly, uttering some vague words about a crime having been done to him. They begin to suspect that he’s hanging around to get revenge for some unspecified wrong, not really getting the idea that he was murdered by the lawyer for his money. After the séance everyone goes to bed, unaware that the lawyer hid upstairs after getting Buck to promise his silence. He’s wearing part of the zombie costume for no real reason and checks that the canopy-lowering switch on the bed still works. He then goes to Buck’s room, bodily picks up the sleeping child, carries him to the murder bed, and kind of plops him down. I was a super heavy sleeper as a kid and I would not have slept through that.

              The lawyer starts the incredibly slow process of lowering the canopy down onto the sleeping child to smother him, and let’s just have a brief aside examining the logistics of this method of murder. Somehow this lawyer, through frequent trips to the house to go over legal matters with a paranoid shut-in, installed a mechanism on the shut-in’s existing bed that would very slowly lower the cloth canopy down onto a sleeping human, all without being noticed. Once lowered the coverage is so tight that not only does it prevent the victim from escaping they are smothered to death. Was this an all-in-one conversion kit he picked up from his local murder store or was it something he managed to piece together himself? Did he consult an engineering buddy from school with the excuse that he was thinking about writing a murder mystery and wanted to get the details right? Was it a prop that Plato had sitting around from his worldwide ghost hunting forays that he decided to get some use out of? If he’s going to smother the boy anyways why not just do it with a pillow in his own bed, why risk waking him up by whipping him from one bed to another?

              Luckily for everyone but the lawyer ghost Plato shows up. His moans wake Buck, who quickly rolls himself off of the bed and starts screaming. While everyone rushes to the room ghost Plato shoves the lawyer under the descending canopy. Buck rushes out of the room, yelling about the ghost and the lawyer and everything, and the scene fades to black as everyone runs into the room. It’s never made clear what the lawyer’s fate is.

              There’s a fun little epilogue as the family sits around the dinner table very clearly relishing the act of slowly counting out their cash. There was a budding romance between the lawyer and Madea, but she doesn’t seem too broken up about it. Elaine states that the ghosts are gone, but when the rest of the family leaves Buck asks her if they’ve really left, and she gives an ominous non-answer, much to Buck’s delight. There’s a final terrible montage of ghost effects in the foyer of the house before the front door closes and spooky red letters spell out “House for Sale.” Then William Castle briefly appears to dare people to take their ghost glasses home if they’re so sure ghosts aren’t real.

              Gimmick aside, there’s absolutely nothing special about this movie, but I kind of liked it. It’s hard to overstate how much decent performances of even slightly interesting dialogue and characters can make or break a movie. I will admit that something like ‘The Uninvited’ was technically (and budgetarily) a better movie, but I didn’t really like the characters and thus didn’t really care as they went back and forth between dialogue scenes where they didn’t say much of interest to each other. The special effects in this movie are way more frequent but much worse than a movie made sixteen years prior, yet I had a better time here. The mystery is foolish and there’s no real closure beyond knowing that the lawyer was the bad guy, but the simple fact that the family is happy and together at the end, along with the frankly greedy way they’re counting their money, endears me to them. As I said this is the first William Castle movie I’ve seen (it was almost ‘House on Haunted Hill’), and this makes me want to watch some more. I think it was the salesman in him that gave him an idea of the kind of movies people want to watch. This is far from high art, but it did leave me feeling pretty good by the end credits, and that’s something a lot of movies fail to accomplish.