Pay the Ghost

MOVIE #1,641 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 05.16.24 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 63. We move from Caged Fury to Cage. This has all the earmarks of peak mid-2010s Wasteland Cage but its inclusion in the horror genre makes it somewhat of an outlier in this project. In fact, over sixty films in, this is only the third (overtly) spooky picture featuring our man (the other two are Mandy and Color Out of Space). That's not to say it's executed all that well. It looks cheap and the cliche droning sound design had me rolling my eyes pretty fast. After a brief intro set in 1679, we meet Cage’s wife (Sarah Wayne Callies — this is as nondescript of a supporting cast as you’re ever gonna find) and son in the present day. The boy has just woken up from a nightmare. Cage, out late pouring over books in a library, takes a cab home. He carries his son to his own bed upon his return…

Cage has been a bad dad lately, too busy with work, but he's gonna make up for it on Halloween tomorrow. He's a college professor (again) and we see him recite some Goethe the next morning in class…


Cage’s son makes a disturbing drawing on his iPad of a being he saw outside his window as he waits for his dad to get home. But Papa Cage is running late so they have to start trick or treating without him. The boy sees a CGI vulture…


At least they actually shot some of this on the streets of New York (unless my eye for green screens is getting worse).but man is this child actor… not great. Mom tries to call Cage but it keeps going to voicemail. The wife is rightfully upset with him when he totally misses Halloween but then she forgives him when she learns that he got tenure and they're gonna have sex later to celebrate hubba hubba…


Son convinces his dad to take him to a street festival even though it's late. The kid sees an actual ghoul among all the costumed freaks and films it on a camcorder. The CGI vulture returns too. In line for ice cream, the boy cryptically does the first of MANY title drops…


Cage then loses his kid and proceeds to freak out. He tells a cop and sometimes an incredibly bad performance in a nothing role can totally take you out of a movie…


Luckily, Cage — like usual — is not phoning it in. On a side note, now that we're more than halfway through this A-Z filmography series, I can say that he almost never has. I often see this debated, but truly lazy performances have been rare, incredibly so. (I need to go back and pinpoint the maybe two or three ones where it seems like he really doesn't want to be there, but there aren’t many.)

Anyway, the kid is officially missing and real police officers are now on the case. Cage and his wife go home, feeling completely devastated and hopeless. The mom/wife blames Cage for this and they both do a decent, if not heavy-handed job conveying the worst possible moment a parent can experience. Cage weeps…


Later that night, the child returns, almost by magic, but something's changed. He is an evil version of the boy and he implores Cage to look out the window where he sees a black cloud drifting down the street before a jump scare alerts us that it was just a dream.

We time-jump a year later, it's three days before Halloween and Cage is living in a studio apartment with a classic unsolved crime collage posted to his wall…


We see Cage teaching in a much more drab looking classroom, lecturing half-assedly about more gothic literature. He checks in at the police station and the detective is clearly not pleased with his constant pestering…


Cage then thinks he sees his son (still dressed as a pirate) on a city bus but when he catches up to it, of course he's not there. But the CGI vulture returns and leads him to a dilapidated factory with some title drop graffiti…


He enters the building and finds a small squatter city in the basement. He inquires about the “Pay the Ghost” spray-paint out front but doesn't get any answers. Then an older blind man with dreadlocks shows up as a lady's tortured screaming is heard (she shows up right before Halloween every year, he tells Cage). The dude shows him more graffiti…


It's title drop city up in here. Oh, hi there...


Cage confronts his wife who has been ignoring him lately outside of her house. He tells her about the graffiti and what his son said (his son said the same thing!). Cage thinks there is something magical going on with the kid trying to connect in some spiritual way, but his wife thinks he's crazy.

Later that night, Cage takes out the camcorder his son was using on the fateful night and then this happens…


That is somehow both corny and legit creepy at the same time, no?

We cut to the mom waking up to some unsettling noises in her house and she sees some Poltergeist-like activities involving a Razor scooter. Legit freaked out now, she goes to Cage and is like, you know maybe you're right about ghosts getting mixed up with our son. Cage responds with an absolute bonkers theory that this is specifically related to Halloween in NYC and that it's an epidemic of sorts. They immediately go see a junkie who lost his girl two Halloweens ago and he title drops too. Anyway, because Cage found this statistic about missing children being less likely to be found if they disappear on Halloween, the cops decide to do something. The detective goes to a Chinese restaurant and the owner title drops in Mandarin.

It's such a stupid plotline. I'm sorry. I watch a lot of bad movies and bad Cage movies specifically (I watch them all, in fact) and this one is just so bland and meaningless, without a wink or a speck of fun. If there's a twist coming at this point, it's guaranteed to be bad. But I'd be shocked if there was a twist because literally nothing has been set up to warrant it, even a shoddy one. We do get a rapid fire succession of jump-scares, though, which seems to negate the concept of a jump-scare, but what do I know?...


It seems a little late in the game to do the whole ‘hire a kooky medium lady' to help them with the case, but that's exactly what Mr. & Mrs. Cage do. This happens…


Well, RIP kooky medium lady. Who died of… something. Yeah, something happened to her. IDK.

Then the son’s spirit gets into the mom's body (?) and carves a message in blood on her arm (?). Cut to the autopsy of the kooky medium lady we just met and her mouth starts smoking. Cut back to Cage and wife, now at his college researching the symbol that their maybe-dead son's spirit carved into her forearm. Turns out it's Celtic and they — very National Treasure-style, I might add — figure out that they need to go to an old Irish church in lower Manhattan that's still used by the relatives of immigrants who survived the plague or whatever in, you guessed it, 1679. It's so comical how fast they get from vague self-harm scar interpretation to that. Meanwhile, back at the autopsy, we learn that kooky medium lady spontaneously combusted from the inside out…


Haha, OK!

Cage and wife take a cab down to the church and they interrupt a pretty out-there ritualistic ceremony involving burning dolls. A lady who at first is like, “hey I'm just a school teacher who does this shit for fun” ends up giving them all the detailed 411 on what the heck happened to their son. An insane and incredibly convenient about-face…


SO convenient! When you write a script that only makes sense to you, simply add a new character at the 11th hour that we've never met before and have her plainly relay what the hell is going on. She could be saying anything!

Cage's coworker at the university digs up some more dirt on the backstory and we get exposition on top of exposition in the form of a flashback. Then some CGI birds cause Cage's cab to crash on his way to confront the woman he heard screaming above the homeless encampment. Oh, also his coworker is launched out of a window to her death…


Cage runs the rest of the way to the dilapidated factory and bribes blind dreadlocks man to show him where the ‘portal to the other side’ is (it's just a metal bridge over some fog with CGI birds). Then he's magically outside in a forest and cue A) scary stuff, and B) the house he saw briefly broadcasted on his camcorder. He goes into that little shack's basement and, SURPRISE! Just 100s and 100s of ghost-children...


He finds his kid! And luckily he’s not fully ghost yet because those are the rules or whatever. Back on the bridge they finally confront the mean old ghost lady and this does not look like it's gonna be a fair fight…


But then Cage's boy summons all the full-ghost children from the realm and they form like a child-ghost tornado and take out the villain…


The whole family is reunited and the boy thankfully doesn't remember anything. He thinks he's just now getting home from the carnival with his dad last year. Well, that's nice. We cut to credits but not before one more CGI vulture because if you got CGI vultures you might as well get your money's worth…


Yeah, so that's Pay the Ghost. Sometimes you gotta “pay the ghost” but also you can get your money (kid) back if you bribe a blind old man with dreadlocks to access the portal to the other side, as well: that’s basically the main takeaway. (#analysis).

The director of this is a German guy named Uli Edel who has a fairly fascinating filmography. His best known films are 1989’s Last Exit to Brooklyn and the Madonna erotic thriller, Body of Evidence. He also directed Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, which won a Golden Globe for Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture made for TV in 1996. So, yeah… that’s Uli! Uli Edel Director Focus when? (Please help me.)

THE VERDICT: 5 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.

Around the corner in this series we have another flick with “ghost” in the title that also begins with “P”: Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland. But before that we’ve got a couple I’m looking forward to: some early Cage (1986’s Peggy Sue Got Married, which I’ve never seen!) and late Cage (2019’s Primal, his reunion with the director of Outcast). Stay tuned!

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #1,640 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #1,642 ⫸

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Pay the Ghost is a 2015 American supernatural horror film directed by Uli Edel. The screenplay was written by Dan Kay, based on a short story of the same name by Tim Lebbon. The film stars Nicolas Cage, Sarah Wayne Callies, Veronica Ferres, Lauren Beatty, Jack Fulton, and Elizabeth Jeanne le Roux. It was released on September 25, 2015.