Thir13en Ghosts shows the Dark Castle formula (remaking Fi5ty year old horror movies with Gen X stars and an edgy nu-metal/rap soundtrack) hitting steep diminishing returns on only their Sec2nd film. Hate to see it.
These movies are sort of charming to me now, because they’re wrapped up in era nostalgia. Viewed objectively, they’re very lame and almost pathetic. They obviously started out as a “how do we relate to The Youth of Today?” brainstorming session among extremely middle aged old men, and nearly finish that way, too.
Ninety-n1999ty-nine’s House on Haunted Hill punched a bit above its weight due to good performances and some inspired art direction. It shows the path they could have taken: Vincent Price was forced to gesture toward (and imply) certain topics we can now state plainly and openly, so maybe subtexts of repressed sexual tension and perversion could be explored a bit more.
Yes, there’s only so much mileage to be had in shouting things another movie whispered—eventually more becomes less—but it would have been interesting for the films to really go all out and debauch themselves. Sadly this did not happen. Don’t worry though, Zemeckis and Silver came up with way better ideas, such as “wouldn’t it be funny if Paris Hilton was in a horror movie lol”.
ThirOneThreeEn Ghosts does not particularly punch above its weight and would struggle to KO Glass Joe. There’s no Geoffrey Rush nor Famke Jannsen and nor is there much inspiration. It’s really loud, and seems like a forerunner to the It movies in that I have to watch it with the audio nearly silent and subtitles on otherwise it reduces my eardrums to exploded and atomized dogfood. Also, it has really, really bad acting. Matthew Lillard is actually horrible in the opening scene. It’s several painful minutes of “jeez, was that the best take you got from the guy?”
The plot is farcical. Few movies survive having their plot recapped on Wikipedia but this one sounds particularly like an extended South Park gag. (excerpt: “Kalina explains that the house is a machine powered by captive ghosts, allowing its users to see the past, present, and future. The only way to shut it down is by creating a 13th ghost from a sacrifice of love.”)
Beating up on ThirThirteenEn Ghosts is pointless. This is the offspring you get when Daddy Corporate Balance Sheet and Mommy Corporate Balance Sheet love each other very much. Interesting as a relic from a particular time in horror movies, it’s like a peaceful dinosaur grazing while an asteroid called Saw is streaking down unseen on top of it.
Walt Disney’s career as a director of animated film was not a particularly inspiring one.
We’ll ignore the Laugh-O-Grams and Alice Comedies since those were cranked out under Stakhanovite conditions for nearly no money for men who often turned out to be literal criminals (Pat Sullivan has a borderline classic Wikipedia page, littered with lines like “Sulivan(sic) would often fire employees in a drunken haze, not remembering the next day, when they would return to work as if nothing had happened“, and a Controversies section split into subheadings “Rape Conviction” and “Racism”).
We’ll also ignore early output like 1921’s Kansas City Girls Are Rolling Their Own Now, which mainly serve as insight into fetishes Walt may have had.
Yes, “Steamboat Willie” and “Skeleton Dance” and “Hell’s Bells” and “The Problematically-Depicted Negro” (etc) are holy classics, but Ub Iwerks (and his hunger for violence) deserve a lot of credit for those. Probably more than he got or will ever get, even by me. “Poor Papa” is great and underrated. “Minnie’s Yoo Hoo” sucks. Etc. More misses than hits, by my lights.
On the whole, you would describe Disney’s directorial output as “stiff, stagey, and moralistic.” You would not describe it as “very fun”. He did not make animation sing. He made it squawk, fret, and preach. His skills were adequate for the rubber hose era. By the 1930s, cartoons were entering their golden years, rapidly exploding in complexity, detail and quality of writing/acting/etc. Walt ended up over his head, his aged and dating skillset like racing a Model T at the Indy 500.
“The Golden Touch” (1935) was famously the result of a bet that Walt couldn’t direct as well as his animators: a bet that his animators immediately and decisively won. The last animated short ever directed by the man behind the mouse, it’s somewhat watchable, but most of the fun parts—like Midas giving himself a gangsterish gold tooth—feel like they were added by animators to try and punch life into things.
The story is flat and predictable and preachy. Don’t be greedy! Even if you don’t know who King Midas is, you can guess the plot after thirty seconds. Countless opportunities for gags are missed. King Midas spends half the short sitting in a chair. And when Goldie grants Midas the Golden Touch, shouldn’t he do it in a funny or interesting way? Instead of just saying “you have the Golden Touch now!” (or something) and disappearing?
I liked the skeleton. I wonder if that came from Walt. I expect it did. He always had an eye for the morbid.
What was Walt good at? I see him as a visionary and a dreamer who made audacious technical bets (synchronized sound, Technicolor, feature-length films), re-imagined the concept of what a cartoon could be, and then found talented artists to execute his vision. He wasn’t much of an artist himself, but that’s okay. There’s the big picture and the small picture. Georgy Zhukov was a talented general on the Eastern Front, but I could probably beat him at kickboxing—him dying in 1974 helps.
In 1969, Jim Henson locked a man in a box and let him die. Don’t worry, it was just for a movie. A movie that now gathers dust in the LAPD’s evidence room inside a locked crate marked “Too horrifying to watch”. How does it gather dust inside a locked crate? Good question.
Let’s talk about The Cube, a Henson-directed telefilm from the same year.
A man is trapped in a white room. He doesn’t know how he got there, and can’t leave. People enter the room through mysterious doors (which only they can see and use), and do things to the man that might be pranks, might be torture, or might be attempts to enlighten him. They rave, threaten, lie, confabulate, explain, offer hallucinatory narratives about what’s happening, then leave. The man is still in the cube.
Henson made films about puppets. The Cube depicts a man (played by Richard Schaal) who’s metaphysically a puppet: he lacks free will, and is at the mercy of his unreliable senses. That’s the simplest reading of The Cube: we are locked inside our own minds: trapped in a skull-box, grasping at threads and slivers of light and sound spilling through pinholes and cracks and fissures, seeking meaning in the pale, languid eidolons, trying to infer the world buzzing outside the cube—a world we can never actually visit, because it would mean stepping outside the boundaries of our own awareness. We are prisoners of the sensorium. And it’s lying to us.
The 60s were a decade made for such questions. Marijuana. LSD. MKULTRA. Postmodernism. The edges of reality and perception were being tested and rewritten and overturned. Science accelerated cultural derealization: we could actually examine an eyeball, and see all the kludges and hacks holding our vision together: see the bloody lattice of veins and arteries spread across the retina, see the optical nerve which interrupts our vision (a blind spot that the brain edits out with a patchwork of surrounding data), see how the sensory sausage is made.
In 1967—one year after Henson and Muppets co-writer Jerry Juhl wrote The Cube‘s screenplay—Doreen Kimura conducted her famous dichronic experiments, revealing the mangled patchwork of the human auditory system. Simply put, aural pathways from our ears to our brain “cross over” inside our heads—what the left ear hears goes to the right side of the brain, and vice versa. But the left hemisphere is dominant for language tasks: so when human speech (for example) enters the left ear, the signal must make an additional trip from the right side to the left via the corpus callosum for processing, adding a few-millisecond delay to the sound. To compensate for this, the brain does the same thing a laggy online videogame does: by artificially delaying the signal from the right ear, so that both left and right stereo signals match. Essentially, your ears hear things happening later than they actually did. The brain coheres all this into a singular experience, a singular sound, but it’s an illusion.
The Cube could be viewed as a metaphor about scientific derealization. It also has religious readings. A Christian Scientist turned hippie, Henson likely had at least a remedial understanding of Buddhism, and The Cube kind of works as a dramatization of three “marks of existence”: Impermanence, suffering, and selflessness.
Anicca: all is impermanent. Reality inside the cube is unsettled and ill-defined. A mud that swirls into new shapes every time The Man tries to touch it Objects and people suddenly appear that weren’t there before. The words of his visitors are no more reliable: often they’re palpable lies, or contradictions. He meets a prisoner called Watson, who claims to have spent a very long time in another cube—how long, he cannot say, because when he tried to mark the passage of days on his thumbnail, they tore it out. (This itself is rugpulled: the man is later described as an actor, playing a role…which is true, of course. None of these events are happening. The Cube is a 1969 TV movie directed by Jim Henson.) There’s a layer of metafiction, as the man sees himself on a TV screen, and must process the implications.
Dukkha: all is suffering. The Man is sent reeling through psychological states. Hope, horror, amusement, confusion, sexual desire, anger. All are useless in the cube. His actions aren’t totally meaningless—people react to him, such as two clowns (the first is apparently a parody of Eddie Cantor) who become savagely angry when The Man fails to laugh at them—but he can’t escape the cube. He’s like a ball in a pinball arcade cabinet: it whips around at dizzying speed, racking up points on bumper after bumper, but will fundamentally never escape the cabinet. The cube is a hell twisted into the shape of a Kline bottle. There’s nowhere to escape, except straight back into it.
Anattā: lack of self. The Man (for he is indeed all men), is the most Hensonian of objects: a puppet. Kermit might have form and shape, but he is hollow cloth with sawed-in-half eyes. His behaviors are supplied by the ghostly demonic hand twisting inside him. Likewise, the Man has no name, and no memories. The torments he is subjected to are nonsense…but in a sense, they’re all that’s real in The Cube. A coquettish seductress walks into the cube, seems to be trying to seduce him…and then reveals it was all an act. This is cruel…but was it really fake? The lust the man felt was real. So is the anger he feels after the prank is revealed. In a sense, she has provided him with what he lacks: an identity as a lustful, angry man. Without the external world torturing him, he would just be nothing. Nothing whatsoever.
Maybe The Cube is simply a freeform Rorschach blot onto which the audience imprints their own meaning. It certainly has a hippie-esque “it’s so deep, man” vibe. And what’s the hippie term for a prisoner of the system? A square. And what’s a cube made of…?
The problem with a film about meaninglessness is that it can quickly shade into the film itself lacking meaning. The Cube does not quite reach that point, but if it had gone on longer than 60 minutes, it probably would have. The Cube is strange, challenging, but perhaps ultimately a bit shallow. Eventually, you get the idea. It’s all a weird, dark game that he’s better off not playing. Instead, even at the end he’s still basically falling for the idea that there’s some “deep reality” that he can reach beyond these shifting stands. Most of the film consists of arbitrary events, that could probably be rearranged in nearly any order with no loss of meaning.
Many of the tricks played on The Man are also tricks on the viewer. A strange monklike figure gives him a mystic artifact called a Ramadar, which might be key to his salvation. But all the Ramadar seems to do is make an annoying buzzing sound, and he smashes it in frustration. Is this a metaphor for the impossibility of enlightenment, or just another red herring? You decide.
The mind is a dark place where all of us live, yet none of us live. And certainly, it is not a place we can escape. My dad had a running joke (likely stolen from some comedian), that old TVs had dust traps down the bottom, and after you watched an old western, you had to empty out all the dead Indians from the bottom of your TV, before they started to smell. They were probably happy to go. They escaped the cube.
