Ghost Ship (film)
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- For legendary and actual sea vessels, see ghost ship.
| Ghost Ship | |
|---|---|
 A promotional film poster for Ghost Ship. |
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| Directed by | Steve Beck |
| Produced by | Gilbert Adler Steve Richards Bruce Berman |
| Written by | Mark Hanlon Mark Hanlon John Pogue |
| Starring | Gabriel Byrne Julianna Margulies Desmond Harrington Ron Eldard Karl Urban Emily Browning |
| Music by | John Frizzell Chad Gray Micha Liberman Alec Wilder |
| Cinematography | Alec Wilder |
| Editing by | Roger Barton |
| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
| Release date(s) | October 25, 2002 (USA) |
| Running time | 91 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $35,000,000 [est.] |
| Gross profits | $30,079,316 (USA) |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Ghost Ship (2002) is a horror movie, directed by Steve Beck. The fictional ship Antonia Graza featured in the movie is based on a real life Italian cruise ship, the SS Andrea Doria, which sank in 1956 after colliding with another liner near Nantucket, Massachusetts. The film grossed a total of $30,113,491 in the U.S. Box Office and stars Gabriel Byrne, Julianna Margulies and Emily Browning.
Tagline: Sea Evil
Contents |
[edit] Plot
[edit] Past - Opening Sequence
The film is set on an Italian ocean liner named the Antonia Graza in the early '60s where about fifty people are enjoying a formal gathering in a luxurious ball room while people dance on the deck. An attractive Italian woman, Francesca, sings the song Senza Fine soothingly as the people are happily dancing to her beautiful voice. Then, in an outer room a gloved hand pulls a switch that unravels a very thin wire cord from a hidden spool. The cord is aligned across the side of the deck. The dancers continue, completely oblivious to the existence of the cord.
Suddenly, the spool holding the wire snaps and the wire slices across the deck like a blade. The people stand still, most likely in shock, as we see the floor covered in blood. The dancers show looks of fear and shock on their faces. Flowers and glasses that some of the victims are holding fall in half and slowly the dancers come apart as well. Numerous dancers remain alive for several seconds, finally grasping that they have been literally sliced in half.
Afterward, the camera moves to the sole survivor, Katie. She was a young girl who was dancing with the Captain and was not tall enough to be struck by the wire. When seeing the fate of the other dancers, she looks up at the captain as he looks back at her with sorrow. A line of blood slowly forms across his face and the top half of the Captain's head falls off. Katie then screams, and the film cuts to the present.
[edit] Present
A small team of salvage specialists are retrieving a sunken ship from the bottom of the ocean. They bring the ship into port and receive its salvage value from the authorities. While celebrating their success at a bar, Jack Ferriman, a Canadian Air Force pilot, approaches them and says he has spotted a mysterious vessel running adrift in the Bering Sea. Because the ship is in international waters, it can be claimed by whomever is able to bring it to a port. The crew soon set out on the Arctic Warrior, a small tugboat. While exploring the abandoned ship, they discover that it is the Antonia Graza, an Italian luxury liner that disappeared in May 1962 and was believed to be lost at sea. The ocean liner's disappearance was well known at the time.
When they board the ship and prepare to tow it to shore, strange things begin to happen. Maureen Epps claims to have seen a little girl on the stairwell while trying to save a crewmate from falling through the floor. Greer claims to have heard the singing of an unseen songstress in various places on the ship. The crew decide to leave the ship but take the large quantity of gold that they find on board. Their tugboat mysteriously explodes, killing a crew member who was trying to fix the boat, and leaving them stranded on the ghost ship in the Bering Sea.
As they decide to attempt to fix the Antonia Graza and sail it back to land, more and more crew members are killed. Maureen Epps meets a young girl named Katie — who was seen at the beginning of the movie dancing with the Captain — who reveals a dark secret: the crew turned on the passengers and each other in an attempt to get the gold that the ship carried. It is revealed that the mastermind of the attack was Jack Ferriman, who is really an evil spirit himself.
Epps decides to blow up the ship, but is confronted by Ferriman, who has killed the last remaining of Epps' crew. They fight for a short amount of time before Epps manages to blow up the ship, "killing" Ferriman. She is left in the debris as the souls trapped on the ship ascend to heaven; Katie stops to thank her.
Epps is discovered by a larger ship and taken back to land. The last scene shows Epps in the back of an ambulance at the docks. She looks out the back of the vehicle from her stretcher and sees crewmembers from the liner that rescued her carrying gold onto the ship, followed moments later by Ferriman. He glares at her, and carries on, her screams cut short by the ambulance doors closing and the fade to the end credits.
[edit] Cast
- Gabriel Byrne - Captain Sean Murphy
- Julianna Margulies - Maureen Epps
- Ron Eldard - Dodge
- Desmond Harrington - Jack Ferriman
- Isaiah Washington - Greer
- Alex Dimitriades - Santos
- Karl Urban - Munder
- Emily Browning - Katie Harwood
- Francesca Rettondini - Francesca
- Boris Brkic - Chief Steward
- Bob Ruggiero - Captain (as Robert Ruggiero)
- Iain Gardiner - Purser
- Adam Bieshaar - First Officer
- Cameron Watt - Second Officer
- Jamie Giddens - Friendly Officer
[edit] Trivia
- Originally conceived as a relatively bloodless psychological horror about four salvage crew members who turn against one another after being stranded in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean aboard the remains of a cruise ship (The Chimera) believed to have been lost in the 1960s.
- The design for the "Antonia Graza" was modeled after the "SS Andrea Doria", a real-life Italian cruise ship that also met a tragic fate: it sank in the 1950s after colliding with another liner. The photo that the captain shows Murphy of his ship rescuing the sinking ship, is actually a photo of the sinking "Andrea Doria", tilting badly to one side before finally going down.
- The opening floor deck sequence of the film where everyone is severed in the torso area by a cable, was originally conceived to be that everyone was decapitated, but the studio didn't like the idea.
- Jack Ferriman's "Soul Collector" character is named for Charon the Ferryman, the Greek mythological spirit who collected souls from one side of the river Styx and ferried them across to Hades.
- Gabriel Byrne replaced Brian Cox.
- The scene on the foredeck where the Captain and the passengers were dancing, and the scene in the ballroom, was a common tradition at the time near the end of a trans-Atlantic voyage. These were usually held a the ship approached the end of the trip, near the coast and these Balls were called the "Captain's Ball".
- The ghost captain tells Gabriel Byrne's character that the Antonio Graza rescued a ship called the Lorelei. Rescuing this ship is what eventually led to the destruction of the Antonio Graza and the death of all its passengers. "Die Lorelei" is a German poem about a siren-type woman who lures boats to ruin and sailors to their deaths.
- During the under-water scene in the end, Emily Browning had to have weights on her skirt because her dress kept on floating over her head.
[edit] See also
- List of films by gory death scene
- Ghost ship, for an article on real-life mysteriously deserted ships.
