Editorials
‘The Shining’ at Sea: The Version of ‘Ghost Ship’ We Almost Got
Save for a fantastic cold open that sees dozens of wealthy passengers dancing on the top deck of an ocean liner, only to have their lovely evening under the stars ruined with a brutal bisection via wire moments later, Ghost Ship wasn’t much of a cruise worth taking. Flash forward four decades, and the main plot has a salvage crew discovering that same ocean liner, hoping to claim it for riches. Naturally, its long-dead passengers may have objections. It was heavy on special effects and cool set designs, but the dialogue and character work were pretty abysmal. Throw in predictable clichés and tropes, and well, Ghost Ship wasn’t as exciting as it promised. But then, the theatrical release we got was far removed from the original screenplay. A gory special effect driven ghost party set at sea was originally a much quieter psychological haunter in the vein of The Shining.
After profitable remakes House on Haunted Hill and Thirteen Ghosts, Dark Castle Entertainment decided to venture away from William Castle territory into original story terrain. They went with Mike Hanlon’s spec script Chimera, a small haunted house type story set on a boat. But it didn’t have that showy style or brisk pace of the previous two films, and so John Pogue (The Quiet Ones, Quarantine 2: Terminal) was tasked with a re-write.
In Chimera, there are only four main characters; Epps, Murphy, Dodge, and Greer, played by Julianna Margulies, Gabriel Byrne, Ron Eldard, and Isaiah Washington in the film. Ghost Ship adds two additional Arctic Warrior crew members in Santos (Alex Dimitriades) and Munder (Karl Urban), plus a tagalong in Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) who puts the ocean liner on their radar in the first place. Instead of the 1962 Italian ocean liner SS Antonia Graza, the Arctic Warrior crew instead finds the 1953 passenger liner Chimera. Hanlon’s script paints a more atmospheric setting and its haunting on a much smaller scale, first with strange sounds and then with shadows. It becomes clear soon enough just how much Hanlon drew influence from The Shining once Epps discovers the hidden stash of gold ingots.
Like The Shining, the haunted setting is much more subdued and factors heavily into the psychological breakdown of the crew the longer they stay on board. Room 400 on the Chimera acts as the oceanic version of Room 237. Most of the paranormal activity takes place in this room, and it’s usually centered around Epps, the only one of the crew members who sees anything remotely spectral. Late in the script (it takes a good half way through before things slowly start to pick up speed), Greer is found in a seizure-like state in Room 400. Once he snaps to, the story follows a similar path as Jack Torrance’s psychotic breakdown in the Overlook Hotel. In the film, much of Greer’s storyline is given to Murphy.
Stanley Kubrick had famously stated that there’s an evil side to the human personality, something inherently wrong, and that’s what he was exploring with Stephen King’s story. Hanlon went a little more specific; greed was the catalyst for Dodge, Greer, and Murphy going mad to varying degrees. Like the Overlook Hotel, the Chimera itself is evil and uses the corruptive nature of the gold to bring out the worst in whoever steps foot on board. When they fall under the ship’s sway, they kill each other.
Pogue’s script took the barebones of this concept and added Ferriman, a demon who gets his victims to sin first so he can collect their souls to later be ferried to hell. Pogue also added two additional crew members and an ocean liner full of ghosts, so there’d be a higher body count and more ghost sequences. Essentially, his version went with the “more is more” philosophy.
The one thing that Pogue surprisingly toned down from Hanlon’s mostly gore less script was teen ghost Katie Harwood (played by Emily Browning in the film), the only fully fleshed out ghost in the initial script. In both, she warns Epps away from danger, and gives her brief flashbacks that fill in the blanks of that critical date the Chimera descended into tragedy. But Katie’s fate is much grimmer and graphic in Hanlon’s script- the 16-year-old is sexually assaulted by mutineers next to the dead bodies of her mother and younger sister while other mutineers hold her father down and force him to watch. They then axe her to death. Pogue’s version leaves the assault implied, and hung after.
Hanlon’s script suffers pacing issues, very little characterization, and plot holes without resolution, namely why Epps can see Katie. Going by The Shining blueprint, we can assume she has something akin to the shining, but it’s never explicitly explained. So, it’s easy to see why another pass was taken at the script- it was needed.
When watching Ghost Ship, you can see a lot of Hanlon’s core motifs and concepts at play, even some of the nods to The Shining, but a lot of what worked about it was made worse by Pogue’s take. The Ferriman demon concept, the removal of the mystery element, the ghostly encounters dialed up to eleven, and an eye-rolling tacked on ending that has Ferriman starting anew all brought down a promising concept. The Shining with a little bit of Session 9, but set at sea sounds like a fantastic horror movie that they should have made.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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