13 Ghosts (1960)

(On TV, May 2020) With legendary horror schlockmaster writer-director-producer William Castle, the gimmick was the thing—his films may not have been very good, but he had an uncanny instinct to meld movies with promotional stunts in a way that still sticks in mind even decades later. With 13 Ghosts, he turns the 3D gimmick upside down by introducing the picture himself and explaining the “special glasses” distributed to theatre patrons, the blue filter showing ghosts filmed in red (“For those of you who believe in ghosts”), and the red filter erasing the ghosts from the blue backgrounds (“For those of you who don’t”) The story is pure “must last the night in a haunted house” stuff, with inelegant integration of the gimmick in an otherwise black-and-white film. It’s ludicrous and clunky, doesn’t add much to the film (there’s no possible “psychological horror” interpretation from watching the film without the ghosts, for instance) and yet it powers the film with an undefinable, irreproducible charm. I did like the film’s ham-fisted narrative: Castle had a very approachable, audience-friendly style and while it lacked sophistication, there was no denying the approachability of the result—I do like House on Haunted Hill quite a bit more, but I’m not hating 13 Ghosts.