THIRTEEN GHOSTS

When it came out in 1960, William Castle’s haunted-house melodrama 13 Ghosts had one exploitable element: the plastic “ghost viewers” that enabled patrons to see, or screen out, the ghosts that terrorized the film’s protagonists. With this device, Castle once again showed the quality that made him a visionary: his insistence that the audience participate in his films. The makers of this remake are so radically different from Castle, they seem to have no idea that an audience is even necessary.

The new Thirteen Ghosts is a live-action cartoon with no characters, no movement, no pace, no scares, and no imagination. Director Steve Beck’s one coup is to set the film (which, like the original, has to do with a family who inherit the house of an eccentric relative who collected ghosts) in a glass house whose doors and panels constantly reshuffle themselves. At one point, someone says, “We’re in the middle of a machine designed by the Devil and powered by the dead.”

— Chris Fujiwara