Plot
When occultist uncle Dr. Plato Zorba wills a huge ramshackle house to his nephew Cyrus and his impoverished family, they are shocked to find the house is haunted. Their new furnished residence comes complete with Dr. Plato Zorba's housekeeper, Elaine Zacharides, plus a fortune in buried treasure and 12 horrifying ghosts. His family soon discovers that these spirits include a wailing lady, clutching hands, a floating head, a fiery skeleton, an Italian chef murdering his wife and her lover in the kitchen, a hanging lady, an executioner and decapitated head, a fully grown lion with its headless tamer, and Dr. Zorba himself who are held captive in the eerie house and must find an unlucky thirteenth ghost to free them. Dr. Zorba leaves a set of special goggles, the only way of seeing the ghosts. However, there is someone in the house who is also looking for the money and is willing to kill for it. The real villain of the film turns out to be the lawyer Benjamin Rush. He attempts to kill Cyrus' son, Buck, using the falling bed canopy he used to kill Dr. Plato Zorba with, but Dr. Plato Zorba's ghost catches him in the act, driving the immediately terrified Benjamin Rush to his death in the bed just as Buck escapes, Benjamin Rush becomes the 13th ghost, and then the ghosts disappear. The next morning, Cyrus and his family count the money, Buck keeps the mask used by Benjamin Rush to scare Buck's big sister Medea Zorba, and they decide to stay.
Read more about this topic: 13 Ghosts
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“After I discovered the real life of mothers bore little resemblance to the plot outlined in most of the books and articles I’d read, I started relying on the expert advice of other mothers—especially those with sons a few years older than mine. This great body of knowledge is essentially an oral history, because anyone engaged in motherhood on a daily basis has no time to write an advice book about it.”
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)