Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

24 October 2020

October is a good month to go digging through horror / suspense films and try to rank them.

It holds up pretty well nearly two decades later. I vaguely remembered it, but regardless of that it was still entertaining to watch. Its story doesn't quite fit into the haunted house pattern - it reminds me a lot of Cube (1997), where the setting is a plot device, but not really "haunted". There actually a pretty rich amount of world building in this film, and I remembered last time that left me a little disappointed: so much history is rushed as exposition, or kept at a superficial level. That bothers me less as I've gotten older.

Tony Shalhoub and Matthew Lillard are the stars in this film (everyone else is more or less bland), and even that casting makes this film a little weird to watch. The visuals get bleak and horrific from time to time, but it's hard to really believe when Monk and Shaggy are anchoring you in the story (Monk and Scooby Doo were more defining roles for these actors, and I watched them there and remember them far better in those stories). I think that, and a lot of the writing veers this toward that unintentional B-movie/Cult classic.

The humor is completely out of place in the film, and the intricate but ultimately absurd plot makes you wonder if the story was supposed to go somewhere else. It was reviewed pretty poorly at the time because it "wasn't scary" and used strobe lights and poor editing with negative results. These things didn't bother me as much (though in theaters the strobe definitely would), and I think time has been relatively kind to this movie. I'd pitch this for a Halloween not-quite-scary movie night and it'd probably get received as a somewhat unique watch, even today. 7/10

2 May 2003

6/10