Thirteen Ghosts

13 Ghosts is one of Castle's more routine films and is usually quickly skimmed over by genre reviewers. Castle was a crude director and his work usually pedestrian and lacking in any style. Many of his films were carried by their sheer chutzpah of Castle's gimmickry or usual collaborator Robb White's often quite inventive scripts. But this film progresses in a dull and stolid way. The hauntings consist of routine and rather cheap double exposure effects or candles, biscuit tins and the like floating around on wires. One scene that momentarily generates some atmosphere is the seance. And Margaret Hamilton, twenty years earlier the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939), has quite effectively cold and austere presence as the maid. Many of White's scripts raised haunted house themes but in the end transpired to only be mundane crime thrillers. Such is also the case here and it is something where White, in turning the latter third over to young Charles Herbert and his 'secret' and the attempts to find the money hidden in the house, kills the
atmosphere.

A cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Russ Meyer, Castle made sure his imprimatur was visible on each of his films. 13 Ghosts, like several Castle films, is premised on a few people alone in a scary house. In this case, it's Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods), a poor paleontologist who inherits a large, shambling abode from his uncle Plato, whom he thought was dead. Plato Zorba was a scientist too, but he specialized in collecting ghosts. Cyrus moves into the mansion with his wife (Rosemary DeCamp), daughter Medea (Jo Morrow), and son Buck (Charles Herbert). Staying on is a housekeeper with a secret, played by Margaret Hamilton of The Wizard of Oz. Soon Medea is quasi-dating the lawyer handling the estate  (Martin Milner), and the rest of the family is seeing ghosts all over the place. It becomes clear that there is more to the situation than meets the eye, or the special glasses Cyrus uses to view the specters, and Plato returns as the 12th ghost to help create the 13th. 13 Ghosts is a low-budget affair, with a small cast and a limited storyline, and scripted by Castle regular Robb White, who specialized in plots founded on theatrically conceived money-scams. But today 13 Ghosts feels almost classical in its austerity. The film can be fun if you approach it in the right spirit, and with a keen respect for Castle's promotional acumen. —D.K. Holm