Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Ariella Broughton It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

Lachlan Coulson This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Ilikehorrormovies I think this film is a soupier classic like I think the acting was great in my opinion. My score is a 7.5/10 by the way. Honestly I don't care if it's "cheesy" or it's "black and white" this film don't need color to be good. I love how you can use 3D glasses to see ghost with them like that's the cool part like I wish they did that in the remake. I'd pretty much like the film.

BA_Harrison Cash-strapped paleontologist Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods) inherits an old mansion from his strange, occult-obsessed Uncle Plato and immediately moves in with his family despite the house being haunted by 13 ghosts, which are only visible through a special pair of goggles.William Castle is renowned for promoting his low budget B-movies with silly gimmicks. For Macabre, he offered a $1000 life insurance policy to every viewer should they die of fright; Emergo—developed for showings of House on Haunted Hill—saw a skeleton with light-up eyes float over the audience; The Tingler employed buzzers attached to the cinema seats to shock unsuspecting viewers; Homicidal's Fright Break was designed to weed out the cowards in the theatre; and, for 13 Ghosts, we have Illusion-O, which requires the viewer to look through a special 'ghost viewer' at certain points during the film.As such, Castle's films possess a certain hokey charm, the sheer corniness of these cheap gimmicks adding a degree of novelty to proceedings. Even though 13 Ghosts is predictable haunted house cheeze, with a creepy housekeeper (played by Margaret 'Wicked Witch of the West' Hamilton), a séance, secret rooms, and a Ouija board (which Cyrus is all too happy to let his kids play with), one can't help but admire the showmanship involved (watch the film with red/blue filters if possible; it's fun to switch from red to blue, thereby making the ghosts appear and disappear).

FlashCallahan Cyrus Zorba works at a local museum but is having trouble providing for his wife and two children. Their furniture has been repossessed and they're not too sure what they're going to do when lawyer Ben Rush tells Buck his late uncle, Doctor Zorba, has recently died and left him his house. The doctor, they are told, had perfected a way to collect ghosts. There are currently 12 living in the house, but the doctor's diary had stated there is space for a 13th.....In the fifties, it was all suits and politeness in William Castle horror movies, and the inclusion of him giving instructions at the beginning of the movie, just adds that extra bit of absurdity to the proceedings.Back in the day, this would have been the equivalent of watching Gravity in IMAX, but now, the gimmick really hinders the narrative.The main problem is that the film just isn't scary, and the fact that they prepare you for a ghost, ruins it a little bit more.I'm not for remakes, but the update of this is much better, even if that is all flashy editing and Shannon Elizabeth, at least its entertaining.

PrometheusTree64 It's another delightfully dumb Castle picture, juvenile and amateurish yet an infinitely more professional production than, say, STRAIT-JACKET.A middle-class family in economic straits has been evicted yet again from their home, their furniture re-possessed (all in that lighthearted '50s way), when they learn their mysterious Uncle Plato Zorba has left them a haunted mansion in Los Angeles. Naturally, they move in without hesitation.The ghosts' enslavement is given minimal explanation, the threadbare plot makes little sense, and Martin Milner as the crooked lawyer needs a few more Stanislovski classes before his cruising down Route 66 or busting heads on the streets of L.A. will be convincing.But as a vaguely pederastic shyster, he's the creepiest thing in the movie. He is, after all,the 13th ghost!Strong points: The lovely music score and Joseph Biroc's B&W cinematography give the movie more dignity than it really warrants, Margaret Hamilton always gives good witch, and Charlie Herbert is a really cute kid in an obviously Capricornian David Archuleta kind of way and an excellent child actor; I want to take him home and burp him to stave off the 40 years of drug abuse that awaits him in real life... And how do you not love Rosemary DeCamp (who played everybody's mother in nearly every TV sitcom ever made)?The movie's effectiveness is a result that eerily doomed early-'60s, JFK-era (give-or-take), end of the world, TWLIGHT-ZONE/PSYCHO, traumatized child, nursery rhyme thing. Nothing's "purer" in its innocent creepiness, even though the violence and gore are at a minimum. It's the poignance of post-war optimism mixed with utter doom, shuddery and forlornly macabre. Even when in the fumbling hands of a non-auteur like William Castle.It's hard to believe that this silly movie was once spooky as hell (I defined it, as a child, as "the second scariest movie I've ever seen", both first and second on my list having been photographed by the aptly-named Mr Biroc, though of course I didn't know that then). But the high-pitched voices of the superimposed ghosts on screen once left an indelible impression on the more naive audiences of an earlier bygone period. For years, I used to get the meat cleaver murder at the hands of the ectoplasmic chef confused with the meat cleaver murder of Bruce Dern during the plantation prologue soirée of HUSH... HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE.... I think it's the cook's toque.Again, the era helps. It feels like a cozy Halloween party, one in which a lot of the pranks and games don't quite come off, but you had a good time anyway and you're glad you went.But I've never viewed it thru the ghostly "Illusion-O" goggles. The same house, by the way, is also seen in 1944's strange little gem, THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE.I've also seen very little of the 13 GHOSTS remake from ~40 years later. Clearly, it's of a different sensibility.