SGM Month of Halloween Horror Movie for Oct. 13

"13 Ghosts" (1960)

Themes: Phantasmagoria
Synopsis (from the back of the box): When an eccentric uncle wills a huge, ramshackle house to Cyrus and his impoverished family, they get the shock of a lifetime. Their new residence comes complete with a spooky housekeeper, Elaine, plus a fortune in buried treasure and 12 horrifying ghosts. As the terrified family soon discovers, these haunting ectoplasms include a decapitated man, a wailing lady and a flaming skeleton, who are held captive in the eerie house and must find an unlucky 13th to free them! Who'll be the final victim of these ghostly shenanigans?

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William Castle ushered in this film with his usual ballyhoo, and, like most of the Castle canon, "13 Ghosts" came with its own gimmick, "Filmed in Illusion-O!" Anyone who's seen any 3-D film which needed the classic red-and-blue glasses to watch it can figure out how this works: In the film, when a character puts on the special "ghost viewer" goggles, the audience dons a pair of red-tinted lenses (blue if they are too scared to see the ghosts). The color filter of the camera in these scenes makes the ghosts obscure to typical viewing, but if you are looking through a red filter, WHOA BUDDY!! It's all "ghosts galore!!"

Except, actually, it's not, really. Some of the ghosts barely show up as blobs on the screen, red filter lenses or not. Of all the Castle gimmicks, this one ranks pretty low on the totem pole. The main appeal of this film is seeing Margaret Hamilton, the Wicked Witch in "The Wizard of Oz," in a sinister red herring role.

The plot is generally threadbare, involving as it does a haunted house, hidden treasure, and ghosts a-plenty. The acting, while ushered in by that timeframe's most accomplished low end A-list actors and actresses of the time, telegraphs that most of the acting troupe understood that their main role collectively was to sell the gimmick of "Illusion-O."

Not a great film by any means, but it's a Castle original, and in that it does have some appeal ... but only if you have red-tinted glasses (or at least half of a pair of 3-D glasses). My copy of "13 Ghosts" on DVD did NOT come with the lenses necessary to enjoy the film on its merits. That's just bad QA.

Rating: 2 count.