Tag Archives: 13 Ghosts

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: 13 Frightened Girls (1963)

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William Castle never fails to entertain me. I’ve enjoyed movies like House on Haunted Hill (1959) and The Tingler (1959) for many years. And his legendary gimmicks are always an added plus to the experience (not that I’ve ever actually EXPERIENCED the gimmicks, but reading about them – and imagining what they would have been like -always adds to my enjoyment of his movies).

In the case of 13 Frightened Girls (1963), the gimmick is a little less visceral than, say, a giant skeleton flying over the audience (Emergo from House on Haunted Hill) or electric buzzers wired to theatre seats (Percepto in The Tingler). This time the gimmick was a world wide talent search for teenage girls to play the daughters of diplomats who attend a special school. So, presumably, this would mean that people from 13 different countries could take pride in one of their own being selected to appear in this movie. I’m not sure if this actually increased ticket sales in the winning countries, but I understand the spirit of the idea.

On the downside, this gimmick seems more like a pre-movie publicity stunt than something that would actually enhance the experience of watching the film. Still, it’s a fun idea.

Judging by the title and the poster, a person might be tempted to think that 13 Frightened Girls is a horror film. It clearly seems to have been named after Castle’s successful 13 Ghosts (1960) and, going in, I almost wondered if I was about to see some sort of sequel to that movie… but no.

13 Frightened Girls is unusual and unique – hard to classify or put into a category. As I watched the first few minutes of it I found myself wondering what Castle had thought he was creating. Did he imagine that this was his version of… a James Bond film? It did come out one year after Dr. No (1962) – and there certainly were a lot of James Bond knockoffs in the 1960s (including some spoofy comedies), but it seems unlikely that this one could have been a direct decedent. Let’s face it, a story about teenage schoolgirls doesn’t quite seem like an obvious riff on Bond.

As the movie wore on, I decided that Castle must have been thinking of Alfred Hitchcock when he made this one. Picture it: a suspenseful story about an ordinary person, in this case a teenage schoolgirl, who gets mixed up in a dangerous game of espionage when she accidentally stumbles upon a murder. That could be a Hitchcock plot – and Hitchcock certainly knew how to use humour in his films…

…which brings me to the point that while 13 Frightened Girls is sort of a suspense thriller, it’s also a fairly silly teen comedy. In fact, I’d say it’s more of a comedy than a thriller. It also contains a potentially uncomfortable Lolita-like sub-plot: Candy, our 16-year-old schoolgirl heroine, is in love with 40 year old Wally Sanders, an intelligence agent who works at her father’s embassy. Wally is in love adult woman named Soldier, so it’s not actually a Lolita story. Still, Candy’s feelings for Wally make her decide to “help” him by using her school connections to spy on other counties and pass the information along to Wally. She does this under her nom de plume, Kitten. 

As you can probably imagine, there is much silliness and humour in 13 Frightened Girls. There are also a few suspenseful sequences. It’s by no means William Castle’s best movie, but it’s quite a bit of fun. It’s also a fairly unique movie, as I can’t think of many (or any) others that are exactly like it. Some viewers might take exception to the cultural stereotypes that are on display. As a nearly 60 year old movie that deals with characters from 13 different countries, it’s almost inevitable that much of it would seem outdated now. For maximum enjoyment, it should be viewed as an artifact of it’s time.

Some reviewers have pointed out, quite correctly, that there are in fact 15 girls in this movie – not 13. I’m not sure how to explain that. Perhaps Castle was originally going to call it something else (The Candy Web perhaps), but then decided to cash in on his earlier hit movie, 13 Ghosts. Who knows? I suppose it should also be pointed out that most of the 13 (or 15) girls don’t ever appear to be particularly frightened, either.

No matter how you look at it, 13 Frightened Girls (1963) is #NotQuiteClassicCinema. I had no idea what to expect from it – and if I had, I might have thought twice about screening it on a  #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn. After all, it’s not a horror movie, or a monster movie, or any other kind of typical drive-in movie. It’s certainly not an exploitation film… or is it? Maybe what William Castle was exploiting this time, was the national pride of 13 (or 15) different countries. Maybe he was trying to start a whole new kind of exploitation. Or maybe he was just making a PG schoolgirl comedy. Someone suggested that it might pair well with an old Gidget movie (Gidget (1959) or Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961) anyone?). And actually that might not be a bad way of understanding this film. Perhaps 13 Frightened Girls was William Castle’s Hitchcock meets Gidget movie. It may have failed to spark a whole new genre, but it’s a fascinating relic of another time. 

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: 13 Ghosts (1960)

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I always liked ghost stories. In most of the ones I remember from when I was a kid, there was only one ghost. There may have occasionally been two or three ghosts in a story. But the idea of one movie having thirteen ghosts in it was absolutely unthinkable to me.

I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard mention of the title 13 Ghosts, but I was certainly aware that the movie existed for a long time before I ever saw it. It is not a movie that I watched on late night TV, or on a Saturday afternoon (which is when I saw great films like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) for the first time). I’m sure that the original 13 Ghosts, would have appealed to me in a similar way when I was a kid. And I was certainly a fan of The Wizard of Oz (1939) back then, which seemed to come on TV at least twice a year (and I watched it every time). So, I liikely would have recognized – and appreciated – The Wicked Witch of the West (or Margaret Hamilton, as some might know her) playing the mysterious housekeeper in 13 Ghosts. But alas, I never saw the movie when I was young.

In 2001, I was a member of the board of the Manitoba Association of Playwrights, and we used to meet once on month on Tuesdays right after work. Like most unsuccessful playwrights, I worked at home, so this meant that I had to walk downtown just as most people were leaving downtown for home. The meetings would often last about two hours, which meant that I would be walking back home around 7:00 PM. And the journey would take me right past the Towne Cinema 8 – which I could remember being built twenty years earlier. It had been a big deal at the time, because it had been Canada’s first stand-alone multiplex cinema.

I would often think, as I walked past, that it would be fun to just stop in and see a movie. But I almost always had other plans, so I would keep walking. But on this particular October evening, there was nowhere else I needed to be. And, I happened to know that there was a horror film playing in honour of the Halloween season.

This was another issue for me. I went to a lot of movies back then. I had friends who would want to go as often as once a week, and it was not unusual for me to wind up at the theatres two or three times in a given week. However, most of my regular companions were not horror fans. They might occasionally agree to go to one, but if it wasn’t spectacular I’d be hearing about it for the next six months. So, I mostly watched horror films on my own, at the Home Drive-In.

The movie playing at the Towne Cinema 8 on this fine October evening was Thir13en Ghosts (2001), the remake of William Castle’s original – which I still had never seen. I don’t usually like to see remakes of classic horror films before I see the originals – in fact, I often don’t like to see them at all – but it had been ages since I’d seen a horror film on the big screen and this seemed like an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. So, I walked through the front doors, down the set of stairs into the basement, and bought a ticket…

I know that some people enjoyed Thir13en Ghosts, and I suppose that I did too, on some level. But basically I thought that it was a big budget spectacle that was short on quality storytelling. It’s been almost twenty years since I suffered throu -I mean, watched it – so, I can’t really remember enough details to talk about it intelligently. And I will be the first to admit that if I watched it again now, I might, possibly, feel very differently about it. So… The point is, on that October evening in 2001, I vowed that I must finally track down watch the original 13 Ghosts.

Thankfully, because of the remake coming out, the original had been released on video and was pretty widely available. I managed to rent it at my favourite video store, Movie Village. I knew going in that it had to be better than the remake. In fact, I was so sure about that, that I probably raised the bar of my expectations so hight that I expected the film to be a work of brilliance that would make Thir13en Ghosts look look a bad re-run of (’80s robot sitcom) Small Wonder.

Well…

It was definitely better than Thir13en Ghosts, in my opinion. But I have to say that I was just a little bit disappointed in it. 13 Ghosts was not light years better than the remake. It had some of the same problems, it seemed to me in that moment, as Thir13en Ghosts. Again, this was almost 20 years ago and I can’t remember exactly what had turned me off. And it’s not that I hated it. I thought it was pretty good. But I had loved movies like The Tingler (1959) and House on Haunted Hill (1959) so much, that maybe I expected more from William Castle. 

But the real culprit, I think, was Thir13en Ghosts. Watching it first, even though I didn’t like it, had somehow cast a shadow over my experience of 13 Ghosts. And as a result, I did not watch the movie again until last Friday. If I hadn’t bought a box set of William Castle Blu-rays, which included 13 Ghosts, I’m not sure if I ever would have.

But I’m really glad I did. This time I went in with much lower expectations. Not really expecting it to be bad – I had thought it was at least decent the first time I saw it – but perhaps I just didn’t have the recent hangover of watching the remake first. And I must admit, that part of me was afraid that I might hate it. However…

I loved it this time! It has a sense of humour, plus some nifty ghost effects (for their time) and some moments of legitimate creepiness and suspense. Had I watched it on a Saturday afternoon when I was a kid, it probably would have thrilled me.

It may still not reach the heights of William Castle’s best work, but 13 Ghosts (1960) is certified #NotQuiteClassicCinema that would be welcome on any #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn or Saturday matinee, and I look forward to watching it again!