Double 13

 Here's another pair for Octoberween: 13 Frightened Girls (1963)/13 Ghosts (1960), both directed by schlockmeister William Castle.

13 Frightened Girls really doesn't live up to its title. It stars Kathy Dunn and 12 other girls as students at a girls' school for the daughters of diplomats in England. Dunn is American, the others are from all over, including the USSR and Red China. On holiday, Dunn goes first to visit Murray Hamilton, an intelligence operator she is infatuated with. Since she is only 16, he just has to try to keep her hands off of him. Anyway, he has a girlfriend, another agent nicknamed Soldier, played by Joyce Taylor. 

Dunn overhears that her father the ambassador is going to send Hamilton home is he can't find out who is behind the student unrest in South America. To protect his job, and keep him in London, Dunn decides to solve this for him. Since she loves gossiping with her fellow international students and going to embassy parties, she solves this one pretty quickly. 

Soon, she is solving all sorts of espionage cases, sending the results in anonymous letters signed "Kitten". Of course, the other countries find out about Kitten and soon everyone is looking for her.

Dunn is basically playing a dimestore Hayley Mills in this, and maybe has the chops to pull it off. The script isn't even too bad, but you can see Castle wasn't happy with it. He adds a cat toss for no reason and the final fight, where all the 13 girls (not frightened at all) join in, is just lame slapstick. Aside from the WTF factor, this was not a great watch.

13 Ghosts was much better. It starts with an intro from William Castle himself, explaining the glasses handed out at the theater. If you want to see the ghosts, look through the red filter. If you don't want to see the ghosts, look through the blue. 

Paleontologist Charles Herbert is broke - the company has just repossessed all his furniture, leaving him, his wife Rosemary DeCamp, teen daughter and young son eating dinner on the floor. But lawyer Martin Milner shows up to let them know that rich eccentric uncle Plato Zorba has died and left them a furnished mansion. The catch is that they must live in it, not sell it, and that it comes with a collection of 12 ghosts. 

They don't run into a ghost right away - just a witch, Margaret Hamilton. She's now the housekeeper, who wants to stay on without pay. She was a partner in ghost collecting with uncle Plato. Castle really hammers on the Hamilton = witch "joke".

Herbert finds an odd pair of glasses, and when things get weird, he puts them on. At this point, the black-and-white movie becomes blue-tinted with red-tinted ghosts. Like the audience using the right filter, he can see the ghosts with the glasses on. These ghosts are a mixed lot: a headless lion-tamer and his lion, a dancing skeleton, and cook continually murdering his wife, and so on. 

To add to all this, there's supposed to be no money in the bequest, but there does turn out to be a stack of cash hidden somewhere. 

This is a rather fun movie. It is more a comedy than horror, and the thrills are very low-key. We saw the remake, and enjoyed it, but Ms. Spenser, at least, prefers this version. For one thing, the ghosts in the new movie were horrible, but rather generic, with no in-movie backstory (extensive backstories can be found on wikipedia, etc). But the house was a lot cooler in the remake, and the story a little more coherent. The remake also skips the gimmick, which I'd say is a wash. But, there is no Margaret Hamilton in the remake. So the original wins.