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(Pleatherface) Dark Castle...The Art of Remaking Versus the Lack of Creativity

By. Pleatherface

Around the late 1990’s, a small group of producers and filmmakers got together to create Dark Castle Entertainment. Their stated purpose at the time was to remake 1950’s and 1960’s horror films from auteur William Castle. The group produced two remakes House on Haunted Hill and 13 Ghosts before pivoting to original material such as Ghost Ship and Gothika. They also put out one non-Castle fil in House of Wax. The studio has a strong history of dipping into various genres besides horror with films like RocknRolla, Ninja Assassin, The Losers, The Nice Guys, etc. They’re horror continues to trickle out with films like Orphan and its sequels/prequels as well as others.

While their initial goal seemed to be working well for them, the poor return on their first two remakes caused them to pivot towards original productions. Luis Pomales-Diaz made a great deep dive into Dark Castle Entertainment, and posits a great reason for the pivot in that besides the poor box office returns, the difficulty in consolidating the rights to Castle’s work from the various license holders made the project extremely difficult to continue. I would be bold and propose that the company was actually ahead of its time, and rather than just the difficulty Pomales-Diaz proposes I believe that at the time other production companies and studies were “not there yet” to make this idea work. Today, it is easier for film companies to pull off this type of project due to two big things, the first being the wave of consolidation we’ve seen in media corporations and the second being the acceleration of consumer capitalism’s need for ever-increasing production to engender a matching consumerism. 

Let’s get back to the movies for a minute though. While their initial releases did not cause great waves moneywise, both remakes eventually gained status within the horror community (especially 13 Ghosts). Of the two set of ‘sibling’ films, I will say I see them as mirrors in a few ways. While they both have similar, closed space setting and supernatural elements; they changes made from the original have completely diverging effectiveness. This section will contain spoilers for movies that are between 25 and 75 years old so you have been warned.

I’ll start with them in ‘chronological’ order (Dark Castle release chronological order) so we’ll begin with House on Haunted Hill. The original House on Haunted Hill from 1958 starred a new favorite of mine in Vincent Price as a millionaire who throughs an eccentric party for his latest wife (with whom we learn through the film he has a contentious relationship). His guest are taken to a manor with a history of violent deaths and offered $10,000 each to anyone who stays the whole night and survives the haunted manor. One of the guest is murdered, the millionaire’s wife, while another, an employee of said millionaire, is being stalked by an unseen entity. Viewers later learn that the millionaire’s wife is not really dead and that with her lover, one of the other guests, they are trying to drive the other woman into madness and killing her husband. After she breaks and seemingly kills the millionaire, Anabelle, the wife, walks down to find her lover and rejoice in their success but is confronted by her dead husband’s skeleton. It pushes her into an acid pit (a lovely décor detail for sure). When the remaining guests return, the employee Nora admits to killing the millionaire; he appears from behind a secret door and tells them that all the guns had blanks and that he did it all to sus out his unfaithful wife and her secret lover’s plan to kill him after she had failed previously with poison. He admits to dumping both bodies into the vat of acid and puts himself at the mercy of the authorities stating he only acted to defend himself from their plot. There are a few solid jump scares, and the film is quite subdued even more so than most of its contemporary horror brethren. It is an intelligent movie in that its plot is well structured in my view and has a great twist at the end. The end leaves us viewers to decide if the husband was in fact in the right or was he also manipulating us as well as his guests. The use of the supernatural is quite clearly explained but left vague in a way that may not satisfy all viewers.

In contrast, the 1999 remake goes all in on the gore factor. The basic premise is the same a dysfunctional husband and wife duo are secretly plotting to fatally deal with each other, but instead of a haunted manor the setting is a haunted mental hospital where horrible experimentation (of which viewers are witness in a framing feature that kicks off the film) happened and the guests are offered a million dollars if they survive instead of 10k (inflation and all). Besides the use of body horror and gore, the supernatural is no longer implied and early on viewers are shown there is something afoot when the guest list changes “mysteriously”. To keep this one short, the place is haunted and the vengeful spirits are trying to bring together the descendants of those who had escaped the original massacre. There are a couple of plot knots that can be confusing and need an extra view or two, but it is generally followable. While in itself it is not a terrible film, it does away with what to my view was the strength of the original: there was no supernatural, it was all a ruse by some of the players involved. While it keeps the fake death of the wife, by adding the wrinkle of actual ghosts it complicates a good formula. While the original had little space to play for the screenwriters, I’d argue they did a good job in creating something fresh-ish yet it does not surpass the original in my perspective.

William Castle's ghosts aren't the only monsters horror keeps resurrecting. Our essay on modern reimaginings of Nosferatu, Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Mummy explores why today's filmmakers continue returning to horror's oldest icons.

On the other hand, we have 13 Ghosts from William Castle that came out in 1959. It is a curious film to put it one way. In contrast to House, it is clearly in the realm of the supernatural and centers on a tight knit group over a congregation of strangers. After viewers learn of the Zorba’s family money struggles, the family patriarch (who seems to be some sort of professor or scholar, make of that what you will) is informed an estranged uncle has bequeathed him a manor. The gift has a stipulation though, that his family stay in the home and not sell it least it be reverted to the state. The home includes 13 ghosts that the occultist uncle had ‘collected’ during his life and had seemingly cost him all his fortune. The family is shown being scared by the apparitions (though not all the ghosts are ‘real’), and we learn that the deceased uncle had created special viewing glasses to see the ghosts. The family’s young son is tricked into looking for a hidden treasure by an unscrupulous lawyer (the estate executor, sure the Zorba fortune is hidden in the home) who is also trying to scare the family away from the home to search at his leisure. Evil lawyer tries to kill the son to push the family away, but the real ghosts (including the departed uncle) scare him and cause him to fall under a bed canopy he had rigged to kill the uncle. The family finds the fortune and lives in peace with the ghosts. It rather feels like it is a premise that offered much more but was undercooked. We get little to no explanation of most ghosts (we do get the tales of some but there is no real thread to connect it all or explanation as to why these ghosts). Almost in total contrast to House, this 13 Ghosts while clever does not really engage the viewer or ask them to think too hard.

Then Dark Castle brought us Thir13en Ghosts in 2001. Here the company made plenty of changes, as the source material’s flimsy-ness allowed for it. Here I felt the writers’ choices, while not always ideal, really felt engaging to the audience. Similar to House, the gore and blood are turned up to max levels and in a successful attempt to replicate the originals gimmick, used clever editing to give the ghosts a more ethereal presence yet ‘heft’ if that makes sense. Here the film opens not with a film-within-a-film artefact but rather with an action-heavy intro scene where viewers get a full introduction to the occultist uncle, called Cyrus Kriticos here (played gleefully over the top by F. Murray Abraham). He is brash and self-centered, nothing like the alluded to uncle in the original apparently. He dies quickly capturing one of the ghosts, and here is where this one takes a much stronger approach to worldbuilding. Viewers are given backstories to some if not all the ghosts, as well as strokes of a master plan behind it all. We also get our first glimpse of Dennis (Matthew Lillard, playing with his usual schtick but slightly subdued) who will play a big part as the story progresses. The family is still struggling economically, though the struggle here is due to the death of the mother (which even with 25+ years separating viewers rings close to many). They are also told they need to live in the house least the lose it to the state. As the story progresses, we learn that the 13 ghosts were gathered by Cyrus for some sort of occult ritual, but that Arthur can stop it by sacrificing himself (also that the 4^th ghost is his dead wife). This is a trick as Cyrus is still alive and hoping to turn his nephew into the 13^th ghost to gain untold power. Dennis sacrifices himself (forgot to mention he’s psychic and had premonitions of this act) to save Arthur (who is played also understatedly by Tony Shaloub), Arthur confronts Cyrus, and the 13 ghosts throw Cyrus into the machine and kill him. Arthur and his kids survive, the ghosts are allowed to rest, including Arthur’s deceased wife. The also find money the uncle had hidden and live likely happily ever after. For all the blood in the film, there are only 4 deaths outside of the intro scene. The gore is not as prevalent as in House, but rather concentrated in producing stunning set scenes and amazing costume and creature design. During research, I read this was one of the few movies that had a majority ethnic cast (Lillard, Cyrus’s paramour, and the scummy lawyer being the only white people) including 3 main cast members of Syrian and Middle-eastern roots. Critical reception was mixed, but the film would eventually attain cult status. And I can see why, but also I would add that on the opposite end of the spectrum with House, here the additions don’t over encumber the story but rather build a stronger world and give us a sense of reason behind Cyrus’s strange obsession.

As a viewer, I enjoyed all four but if I had to rank them, I would rank the original House on Haunted Hill as the best, followed by the 13 Ghost remake, the House remake, and the original 13 trailing sort of far behind. I think the first two especially try to play around with the audience with misdirection and create a fuller story that both engages and entertains. The House remake just adds too much and unfortunately the film suffers for it, and the original 13 is just undercooked from my perspective making it feel more like a tv movie or a shell for a gimmick.

Circling back to the topic at the start, consumerism and the remake obsession of studios, I would argue firstly that Dark Castle’s attempts were defensible and should be the type or remaking that other studios engaging in. In the case of both originals, there was both a space to improve/expand on the original and an untapped audience potential. While the remakes are far from perfect, the eschew just repeating the originals by adding with varying degrees of success to the point that one could posit that neither pair of films explores the exact same space or themes. As much as I felt the House remake added too much, it gave the film a new angle by making explicit the supernatural element and giving some of the ‘guests’ more personality. 13 Ghosts does it much better, by giving audiences a motive behind the whole collection and beefing up the characterizations and backstories to create a much more fulfilled world. There is also the important part of untapped potential audiences. Remaking Masters of the Univers, Ghostbusters, etc. is not the path I suggest, as these are intellectual properties that had a peak and an impact that would weigh heavily on any attempt at remaking them (see the female-led Ghostbusters). What is worse, doing so with impactful intellectual properties betrays any sense of originality; there is little to be gained artistically, it is all about money. But then again, this is just a natural need of consumer capitalism, or so we are told. But make no mistake, there is nothing natural about this need for excessive production that encourages excessive overconsumption. What’s more, this overconsumption encourages uncritical approaches to consuming cultural artefacts, which in turn leads to a festering of both prejudicial ideas and racial biases that endow white supremacist ideas that are slowly gaining mainstream attention that they had ceded in the immediate past. We must fight this pressure to consume un-critically, to consume for consuming-sake and demand more for our attention/money. And there is where I see the genre of horror doing what other genres did as well (or better some may argue) in the past.

As some of you might know, my thing is to watch movies with the eyes of a newbie to the genre; someone with little knowledge of history or conventions. In my journey I’ve come to slowly see the outline of the genre’s evolution and one of its greatest strengths: responsiveness to the present. In the past, I’d argue that comedy offered the best space to explore contemporary issues, that laughter allowed us to tackle subjects that serious conversations may not have been able to tackle. But as I learn more of the horror genre, I see how it is capable (arguably in a time where erroneously many claim that comedy is dead) of doing that which I say comedy was able to do, but instead of doing it through laughter it does so through another emotion that can override our naturally set barriers or defenses: fear. By lowering that defensive barrier through extreme emotions, be they laughter or fear, we encourage audiences to open to ideas and different point of view. We also encourage them to engage in metaphor, to make their minds work and be critical of the status quo without addressing it directly like a hammer to the head. Ultimately, this is the type of critical consumerism we want to encourage, one that is open but also demanding of quality; one that is vulnerable but one that is also thoughtful. We must eschew the macdonaldization of cultural production, and also of cultural consumption. And remakes can be a part of that better consumption, when done well; that may be the lesson to learn from the Dark Castle experiment.

Dark Castle wasn't simply repeating old stories. It was asking what those stories could become for a new generation. Pleatherface makes a similar argument in his essay on Suspiria, examining how older horror films continue to generate new meanings for contemporary audiences.