UTG’s 31 Days Of Halloween: ‘Thirteen Ghosts’

Of all the holidays celebrated worldwide, no single day is more loved by the UTG staff than Halloween. With the arrival of October, the time has finally come to begin rolling out a plethora of features and special announcements we have prepared in celebration of our favorite day, including the one you’re about to read.

31 Days Of Halloween is a recurring daily feature that will run throughout the month of October. The hope and goal of this column is to supply every UTG reader with a daily horror (or Halloween themed) movie recommendation that is guaranteed to amplify your All Hallows’ Eve festivities. We’ll be watching every film the day it’s featured, and we hope you’ll follow along at home. If you have a suggestion, contact us and we may include your favorite scarefest in an upcoming column!

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Day 29: Thirteen Ghosts (2001)

If you are anything like me you started getting in to horror in middle school. Right around the time the new millennium started is when my friends and I started to try to scare each other with movies instead of making each other laugh. Suddenly it was fun to be terrified instead of the experience just being…uh…terrifying. It usually starts with the classics. You get ahold of a VHS copy of A Nightmare On Elm Street and you cannot sleep for a week. Being young and naive in the ways of horror leads to watching some bad movies that you mistake for good and one of my first and favorite modern horror flicks was one of those. I am still unsure as to what drew me in to Thirteen Ghosts (probably because it had the most ghosts per dollar spent to rent it from the video store) but the love affair that started over a decade ago still lasts today.

It also may have had something to do with the hot naked ghost...

It also may have had something to do with the hot naked ghost…

If you have not seen Thirteen Ghosts I will try to sum up the plot as concisely as I can but please bear with me, it is kind of a convoluted story. So there is this house that is actually a giant machine that houses some ghosts (something like thirteen of them) because it is actually not a house at all but a complex and sinister machine that uses the ghost power to see all things future, past, and present. The guy from Monk inherits the house and, of course, his lawyer accidentally releases all the ghosts, but don’t worry, he is punished for it in the most awesome death scene of 2001.

Now his rates are half off. I'll let myself out.

Now his rates are half off. I’ll let myself out.

So now it’s up to Monk and his kids (and Shaggy from Scooby-Doo) to stop the ghosts with the help of their dorky looking ghost glasses that allow you to see the dead. That is pretty much the plot of the movie, and it is pretty weak. It does not matter though. The real draw of Thirteen Ghosts is the ghosts. There are a bunch of them and they all have intricate and amazing back stories. Unfortunately most of those back-stories are not in the film at all. Now 2001 was just about the time that the DVD was taking off so for the first time in my life I had DVD extras to explore and Thirteen Ghosts does not disappoint in that aspect. Every gruesome back-story is outlined and the menus were creepy as all hell. So do yourself a favor and watch Thirteen Ghosts, the level of detail put in to each unholy creature makes up for the shortcomings of the film. Just make sure you at least read the ghosts’ back-stories on Wikipedia first.

Editorial written by: Justin Proper – Follow him on Twitter
Last year’s Day 29 film: The Devil’s Rejects

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One Response to “UTG’s 31 Days Of Halloween: ‘Thirteen Ghosts’”

  1. Brian Lion says:

    Spot on. I loved the shit out of this when I came out. I watched it over and over with whomever would sit through it with me. Each ghost was so fucking cool and I wanted that house so bad — minus the ghosts. Awesome deaths, awesome scares, ridiculous plot. Watched it recently and laughed a lot more than I did back then but it’s still fun.