13 Ghosts

13 Ghosts...1960...85 minutes...starring Charles Herbert, Jo Morrow, Martin Milner, and Margaret Hamilton...written by Robb White...directed by William Castle

When you're on your last dollar, and your furniture is being repossessed, you might take some extraordinary steps to make sure your family has a roof over its head. You'd certainly take any opportunity to find shelter...and that's just what Cyrus Zorba does when he finds out that his rich but eccentric uncle has passed away. Cyrus has inherited a grand mansion, and the collection of ghosts that Dr. Zorba had collected. The now-deceased Zorba used a pair of special glasses to see the earthbound spirits, and he himself is now one of the dead souls that roam the halls. What other strange secrets lie inside the mansion? Will Cyrus's family live long enough to find out?

Here we have another Castle/White collaboration, and not surprisingly, another gimmick was used to help market the film. This time, certain movie shots were in a complete blue screen...and the ghost effects were colored red. Now the gimmick was you would look through either blue or red lenses, depending on whether or not you believed in ghosts. (One heightened the specters on the screen, one faded them out.) Castle called the effect "Illusion-O"...not quite a 3D effect as you might imagine. Castle makes an appearance at the start of this film as he did in "The Tingler" to explain how things work.

The movie itself isn't exactly exciting on its own, so I can understand why some extra "pizazz" was thrown in. Still, like most of the films that this creative team put out, the movie has its moments. One of the running gags in the movie is that Buck, the young child of the Zorba family, keeps calling the maid a witch...appropriate since she's played by Margaret Hamilton, who is of course the Wicked Witch of the West in "The Wizard of Oz". In the last scene of the film, she grabs a broom and gives the camera a knowing look.

Still, the ghosts are mostly caricature figures of ghosts...and the story is just, well, yawn. Some of the performances are worth watching, and if you like seeing some of the earlier horror movies, you'll probably find this one not entirely horrible. Are there better movies, even in this period, out there? No doubt. But in this genre, believe me, there are worse as well.

I give 13 Ghosts 2 well-timed blasts of cold air out of 5.