Director Mike Flanagan, celebrated for The Haunting of Hill House and Doctor Sleep, returns to the supernatural with Thirteen Ghosts (2025), a bold reinvention of the cult horror classic that first terrified audiences over two decades ago. Far from a mere remake, Flanagan transforms the iconic glass mansion into a living, breathing entity — one infused with memory, guilt, and blood.
Christina Ricci stars as Eleanor Kriticos, a brilliant but emotionally scarred parapsychologist who inherits her late uncle Dr. Cyrus Kriticos’s infamous glass mansion. Known for his controversial experiments merging science and the occult, Cyrus left behind a house that is both prison and machine, a place where sorrow and the souls of the damned converge. Eleanor, determined to uncover the truth, enters the mansion with psychic medium Ben Foster (Matthew Lillard), the sole survivor of Cyrus’s original experiments, and historian Iris Vale (Anya Taylor-Joy), whose obsession with forbidden architecture borders on mania.
Within the mansion’s shifting glass corridors lie twelve tormented spirits, each a reflection of human guilt and tragedy. From the Bound Mother consumed by grief to the Twisted Soldier betrayed by comrades, each ghost embodies a story of suffering and sin. Yet as the mansion stirs, Eleanor realizes the house is more than a tomb — it is a summoning device, and she is destined to become the thirteenth ghost, the final piece in a ritual that bridges life and death.
Flanagan’s vision elevates the film beyond conventional scares. Every ghost reflects the living, transforming trauma, regret, and denial into physical, haunting presences. The mansion itself mirrors the human mind, its constantly shifting architecture symbolizing the walls we build to contain pain. Visually, the film blends gothic atmosphere with psychological realism: glowing sigils shimmer through fogged glass, whispers echo through mechanical breathing, and each ghost, reimagined by award-winning concept artist Aaron Sims, embodies the twisted beauty of human suffering.
Fans are drawn to the film’s powerhouse cast: Ricci channels fragile intelligence and hidden terror, Lillard brings haunting emotional depth, Taylor-Joy balances grace with quiet madness, and Bill Skarsgård delivers an ethereal presence rumored to haunt the mansion as Cyrus Kriticos himself.
At its core, Thirteen Ghosts (2025) is not only a chilling horror experience but also a meditation on the ghosts we carry — guilt, loss, and shame that refuse to stay buried. In Flanagan’s hands, the mansion reminds us of a simple, terrifying truth: “Some houses don’t just keep secrets… they keep souls.”