13 Ghosts 13 Ghosts Columbia TriStar 1960 / B/W / 1:78 anamorphic 16:9 / 85m. Starring Charles Herbert, Jo Morrow, Martin Milner, Rosemary DeCamp, Donald Woods, Margaret Hamilton Cinematography Joseph Biroc Art Direction Cary Odell Film Editor Edwin H. Bryant Original Music Von Dexter Written by Robb White Produced and Directed by William Castle
	Reviewed by Glenn Erickson Everyone's favorite fast-buck horrormeister William Castle had a checkered career. He started out as a promising director with the occasional excellent sleeper hit (When Strangers Marry) hidden in his filmography. At the same time that Robert Aldrich was paying his assistant's dues, Castle was working as an assistant director for luminaries such as Orson Welles, on The Lady from Shanghai. By now most fans are well aware of his string of horror-lite hits that relied on clever gimmicks to distinguish themselves: Insurance policies against dying while watching the movie, real props suspended in the air over the theater audience, chairs wired for vibrating motors and audience-participation polls. He tagged his gimmicks with words like Emergo and Percepto, names that stayed in the memory of impressionable and imaginative moviegoers longer than the movies themselves did. Castle was deified in Joe Dante's wonderful 1993 movie Matinee, which reinvented the huckster as a joyful showman every bit as impressionable and imaginative as the kids he catered to. 13 Ghosts was one of his biggest hits and one of the few where his gimmick was actually seen in most of the theaters where the film played.  1 Synopsis: The Zorba family inherits a furnished mansion from a reclusive uncle, which seems a stroke of luck as their finances are so poor they're selling their furniture. Moving goes well until they're informed that their benefactor was an eccentric who believed he was collecting ghosts, thirteen to be exact. Father Cyrus (Donald Woods of The Public Enemy) is befuddled by floating candles. Daughter Medea (Jo Morrow) is accosted by a frightening apparition in her bedroom. And curious son Buck (top billed Charles Herbert) goes on a basement-to-attic ghost hunt. Mother Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp) wants to move out, as recommends the stern housekeeper Elaine Zacharides (Margaret Hamilton) -- a move seconded by their young real estate counsellor, Ben Rush Martin Milner). But the curiosity factor is just too much for the Zorbas: Part of the will left them a strange box with a hi-tech pair of 'ghost viewers' inside ... After the strange and original The Tingler, which advanced the idea of fun above story logic,  2 Castle and his unsung writer Robb White made 13 Ghosts into a lightweight show that really doesn't make too much sense. The scares all come from the moaning ghosts on the soundtrack and the gimmick itself, the details of which are remembered by every kid alive at the time. Probably fed up with her little brother, Savant's sister went to see 13 Ghosts without him and came back with one of the viewers, reporting that it was 'really scary.' Savant stared at the 'Illusion-O' glasses wondering what it was all about ... older sisters never explained anything in detail. Thanks to this DVD, Illusion-O is back in all its glory. One side of the disc is the straight movie with no gimmick, so if you start playing the film and the title sequence is not in color, stop and flip. The single viewer supplied looks something like 3-D glasses, but with the red & blue filters placed over and under instead of side-by side.  3 Every Illusion-O sequence is printed in color, with the ghosts a colored overlay. View through the red gel, and the ghosts are visible. Watch through the blue, and they disappear (well, almost). Of course, this caused some confusion in theaters because the ghosts were plainly visible without the glasses. The erasing gag did work, however, and was a fun novelty. The benefit of all this hoo-haw in 1960 was word-of-mouth enthusiasm. 13 Ghosts was a must-see movie, and the gimmick made a fairly tame film into a boxoffice sensation. The show itself is an amusing oddity. The cast is good, with young Charles Herbert carrying the main role quite well. The rest of the Zorba family are so eccentric that we wonder if writer Robb White were trying to perpetrate some kind of inside joke, naming the daughter Medea, etcetera. The general thesping style in the film is so bland and cheerfully blasé, it's as if everyone had been lobotomized and this were a satire on complacent television families. White and Castle may have been trying for something like this, but if so, the film is far too subtle. Still, the odd tone adds to the tension. Margaret Hamilton is underused but makes a fine red herring. Martin Milner is the obvious villain. Dad Donald Woods and Mom Rosemary DeCamp (love her voice) remain calm beyond all reason. Events become surreal when the family grossly underreacts to real manifestations of ghosts and possible mayhem, and weathers the various threats as if they were minor annoyances. Since the movie is consistently played along these lines, we watch in amused befuddlement, wondering if this disproportion is going to be part of some big surprise resolution. No such resolution ever happens. This subtle WEIRDNESS in 13 Ghosts is hard to describe. It doesn't make the movie any better (and it's not a film that holds up very well after you've seen it 2 or three times), but it is a puzzlement. Did White and Castle know what they were doing, or is this all just a gentle tug at our pant legs? Columbia TriStar's DVD of 13 Ghosts is finally restored to its full Illusion-O majesty, for the curiosity of all. The picture quality changes during the special sequences, which were filmed on different Eastmancolor stock but were apparently not too difficult to restore.  4 Overall the 16:9-enhanced picture is excellent. Extras include a very educational short docu by Jeffrey Schwarz that smartly nails its subject; the Castle introduction showing you how to use the Ghost Viewer; trailers, notes, and a Spanish soundtrack. On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor, 13 Ghosts rates: Movie: Good Video: Excellent Sound: Excellent Supplements: docu, "The Making of Illusion-0", notes, trailers, original William Castle intro. Packaging: Amaray case Reviewed: September 16, 2001 Footnotes: 1. Although all the advertising for House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler prominently featured Castle's gimmicks, very few theaters were ever wired for 'Percepto' chair buzzers or rigged for 'Emergo' flying skeletons. The poster for The Tingler just showed a theater chair, which promised the scary thought of some kind of REAL audience participation. Since people screamed in the movie, we kids assumed that only a few chairs could be outfitted for the gag, and that we hadn't been so lucky as to be seated in one. Return 2. One of Tim Lucas' very best brainstorms in his magazine Video Watchdog was his perception of a big mystery in The Tingler. Tim's theory is that Columbia thought the tone of the show too black and too 'dangerous', and that a clever reshoot of certain scenes was undertaken to lighten things up, to make Vincent Price a terrified hero instead of a diabolical villain. As finished, the movie plays straight until the third act, whereupon things simply stop making sense: The deaf-mute woman's hallucinations, the actions of her husband, who carries a corpse across town for a secret autopsy - and then takes it back home again? The movie ends without a real resolution, relying on sheer fun to carry it through. Lucas followed the logic of Robb White's careful story setup and realized that Price's now-isolated LSD session was originally just the first use of the drug. The deaf-mute woman's husband used LSD on her as well, accounting for the surreal scares in the bathroom and other 'impossible' occurrances. Also, Lucas thinks Price may originally have actually shot his wife dead, and that the Tingler was returned to HER body to dwindle and die, not the deaf-mute lady's. It's a fascinatingly clever piece of film detection by Lucas, the kind of thing that makes Watchdog a must-read. I wish I could get my hands on an original shooting script! Return 3. Savant found the viewer provided with the disc to be rather on the small side, but adequate. A coupon provided offers to sell us more at an exhorbitant 2.95 each. Return 4. Wayne Schmidt, who restored the film at Columbia, said that the elements for the Illusion-O version of 13 Ghosts were intact and that the photochemical production of new prints, etc., required some trial and error but basically went off without a hitch. The only problem was explaining the 'process' to the eager marketing people, who thought Illusion-O was 3-D or something. The Tingler was much more problematic in that all the original 35mm elements for that movie's color sequence had faded terribly. When faded to red, the bathtub effect just didn't work. A 16mm Internegative had to be used instead. It's great that Columbia has the oomph in its film restoration division to pursue these oddball problems; these can't be million-selling DVD titles we're talking about. 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