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Subversive Cinema: Thirteen Ghosts
Apr. 9th, 2008 | 07:49 am
Last Friday M and I got in late, but were still a little too restless to go to bed. We hit the sofa and turned on the TV, and I was delighted to see the opening of the 1960 version of Thirteen Ghosts. This, along with The Tingler, is one of the first horror movies I can remember seeing. I watched it on TV with my dad when I was five or six and was profoundly affected by two things in it. One was the possibility that the sinister housekeeper might actually cut out a little boy’s tongue for calling her a witch. (I’m sure I was disappointed when it didn’t happen.) The other was a close shot of a revenant’s ragged, cobweb-covered feet clumping down the halls at night. These two things and a floating Ouija board planchette were absolutely all I could remember about it, so while M dozed off, and eventually stretched out snoring, his head in my lap, I sat up and watched.
Often, when you revisit fondly remembered movies from your childhood, it’s a disappointment. Not in this case. Sure, the special effects are cheesy and the story riddled with logical loopholes, but there’s a strain of subversion running through this film that I completely missed when I was in kindergarten.
The plot is simple. A Los Angeles family learns that they’ve inherited a dilapidated mansion haunted by at least a dozen ghosts. It seems a wealthy, almost forgotten uncle had traveled through Europe collecting phantoms and bringing them home, kind of like William Randolph Hearst’s famous raid on Old World antiquities. Uncle Plato has died under mysterious circumstances and left the house to the family, stipulating in his will that they must live there or the property reverts to the state. In addition to the ghosts, the place comes with a hatchet-faced, broom-wielding housekeeper played by Margaret Hamilton, who I guess was having a little fun before the Maxwell House Coffee people got in touch with her.
All this seems fairly straightforward and generic down to the cardboard sets and that pale early-sixties black and white -- until you sit down and actually watch the movie.
( Read more. (SPOILERS) )
Often, when you revisit fondly remembered movies from your childhood, it’s a disappointment. Not in this case. Sure, the special effects are cheesy and the story riddled with logical loopholes, but there’s a strain of subversion running through this film that I completely missed when I was in kindergarten.
The plot is simple. A Los Angeles family learns that they’ve inherited a dilapidated mansion haunted by at least a dozen ghosts. It seems a wealthy, almost forgotten uncle had traveled through Europe collecting phantoms and bringing them home, kind of like William Randolph Hearst’s famous raid on Old World antiquities. Uncle Plato has died under mysterious circumstances and left the house to the family, stipulating in his will that they must live there or the property reverts to the state. In addition to the ghosts, the place comes with a hatchet-faced, broom-wielding housekeeper played by Margaret Hamilton, who I guess was having a little fun before the Maxwell House Coffee people got in touch with her.
All this seems fairly straightforward and generic down to the cardboard sets and that pale early-sixties black and white -- until you sit down and actually watch the movie.
( Read more. (SPOILERS) )