Ridiculous and inexplicably creepy: Thirteen Ghosts (2001).

Sometimes an image sticks with you long after you've forgotten everything else about the movie. It's one of the reasons I love horror. Even if the movie couldn't scare you, it might have given you something you can scare yourself with later. Thirteen Ghosts is full of these images. The ghosts are creepy and sad one moment and then terrifyingly angry the next. These are brainworm scary images. Sort of effective when you first see them in the context of the idiotic plot, but much more vivid when you're laying in bed thinking about the movie later. Then it's just you and a feral madman in a straight jacket, or a naked woman with black eyes and a kitchen knife.

The people who built the world of this movie had a real vision for what they wanted. They had purpose! They were going to make a big glass and metal haunted house that was amazing and impressive no matter how stupid the plot was. And they were going to fill it with some damn fine ghosts. Because their parents didn't raise them to be quitters. And they have a pretty good point, I think. When a movie is as ridiculous as Thirteen Ghosts, you have to either give up and do a half assed job for the paycheck, or you have to throw yourself into things and really SELL the idea of a big glass house that is actually a "machine designed by the devil and powered by ghosts."

The set designers and special effects people clearly picked the second option, and it's that commitment to the ridiculous premise that keeps Thirteen Ghosts from being just another forgettable late 90s - early 00s teen slasher. The ghosts feel like they really inhabit the space they're in, and they're genuinely spooky in spite of the constant flash cuts that are somehow supposed to frighten us.

Partly the effectiveness of the ghosts is the choice to use makeup instead of CGI. One of the hallmarks of good horror makeup is that you can still see the actor underneath. The ghosts are often silent, but you can read their emotions in their faces and their body language. It makes things more unsettling when the gored up teen with the baseball bat looks so sad.

They put a lot more effort into the ghosts than the real people, but the ghosts themselves aren't without flaws - the naked woman ghost is creepy as a ghost, but oh my god completely unbelievable as a naked lady. She's built like a barbie doll with inflated breasts, and she's covered in deep gashes all over her body, which we're later led to believe is because she killed herself. That's a hell of a way to kill yourself. Her breasts must have driven her into a frenzy!

But she's also given one of the only genuinely touching moments in the movie, as she watches Elizabeth Shannon fix her hair in the mirror, touching her own hair like she had forgotten it existed, like she had forgotten all about feeling pretty. She watches quietly and almost blankly, but the fact that she's watching at all is an unexpected moment. 

The whole movie swings wildly between insane nonsense and great design, which at least keeps things interesting. The only boring moments are when we have to listen to the living characters talk about their feelings or convince us that they're actually crying about their dead mom. The rest of the movie is like a ride through a giant glass and metal haunted house, where the walls shift and move at the whim of some dark inexplicable mechanism at the heart of the building.

Thirteen Ghosts is a movie in the true spirit of the William Castle original. It's totally more of a ride than a story. The house is a mechanism for moving the characters from one encounter to the next, and it moves us along with it. The alive people on screen are almost exclusively boring and obnoxious (with the exception of Matthew Lillard who is perfectly in his element here as a scenery chewing depraved psychic ghost hunting pillhead). The filmmakers put every bit of their love and care into the set design and the monster design, and as a showcase for those the movie is perfect. It's like a really interesting silent movie with the music replaced by idiotic dialogue. Just watch it on mute.