Thir13en Ghosts (2001)

I’ve loved Matthew Lillard for a long time. Ever since he played Cereal Killer in Hackers, then his roles in Scream, SLC Punk!, and even the super terrible Wing Commander and Summer Catch, he is often the most charming part of any terrible movie he is in. And the movies are often terrible. Matthew Lillard was, in fact, my primary motivation for seeing Thir13en Ghosts in the first place. 

In 1996, Wes Craven released the movie Scream, which seemed to launch a cascade of teen horror films in its wake. It’s more likely that Scream was timely for me personally, welcoming me into my nascent teenage years. Or it could have been my relationship to Neve Campbell, already fortified in my young, Goth-adjacent mind, with The Craft. (In fact it was definitely one of those two since many, many horror movies featured teenagers long before Scream came on the scene.) But still, Scream, and its leading lady Neve Campbell, seemed to launch a thousand ships of not very good teen horror films, cast with obscenely attractive people, throughout the end of the ’90s and into the early 2000s. This wave didn’t end in the early 2000s… I just stopped paying attention. Urban Legend, Final Destination, the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and House on Haunted Hill. And I’d be remiss if I failed to mention Scream’s closest relative, I Know What You Did Last Summer, or either film’s many, many diminishing returns—the sequels. And there’s more, so many more.

This is a long way to go to get to Thir13en Ghosts but, honestly, I don’t think this movie gets made without a particular line of teen movie forebears (both horror and otherwise), starting in particular with Scream. So it goes: a family, down on their luck, helmed by the delightful and perennially hapless Tony Shalhoub, inherits a house. A house that is—spoiler alert—haunted! Matthew Lillard plays his usual nitwitted, loud, weird, dude character, but this time as a ghost hunter and—gasp—not a teenager!

The movie came out in 2001, the same year I graduated high school and started college. I went to see it in the theater and awarded it the Amber-laughed-all-the-way-through-this-movie stamp of not-quite approval. It was not good; it was bad. But it was bad in a way that made me laugh. Because it was silly. And for that reason, and one particularly hilarious death scene, it was also unforgettable. 

This past October, during a horror movie bonanza, my partner and I decided to watch it. I found myself getting excited, regaling him with the promise of a scene where a glass door kills someone by slicing them in half, their body squeegeeing down the glass. And on a rewatch that scene was as good as I remembered it—and surrounded by so many more good scenes! Come to this movie for the inventive death scenes, but stay for the laughs. Despite a slowish onramp, the movie ends up as silly and kind of joyful as a terrible (I mean truly terrible) horror movie can be. 3.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Amber Nelson