Nicolas Cage's Ho Hum Horror Hackwork Pay the Ghost is Like My Ex-Wife's Meatloaf Surprise: Subpar!
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
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Nicolas Cage hasn’t made that many horror movies. Yet it seems appropriate to refer to him as a horror icon all the same. Cage’s late-period comeback is largely a product of the actor lustily embracing his cult status.
Cage never stopped being a uniquely gifted actor, as evidenced by his virtuoso turns in Joe and Pig but he pulled himself out of a steep, seemingly irreversible professional slide by coming to peace with being a human meme.
The horror genre has been good to Cage. Vampire’s Kiss marked the birth of Nicolas Cage the icon while Mom and Dad and Mandy were huge components of the Academy Award winner’s late period comeback.
With Cage and Travolta they can’t all be winners, however, if I might indulge in a bit of understatement. That is particularly true of the lean years, when stinkers outnumbered winners by a great margin and good movies and successes were few and far between.
As we are seeing, the teens have generally been brutal for Cage. It didn’t matter whether the beloved actor was cranking out another generic, interchangeable direct to video action movie or branching out with a generic, interchangeable direct to video political drama or horror movie. With some very notable exceptions, Cage’s movies from this era were thin gruel, rough stuff, a sorry assortment of low-energy, low-ambition duds.
The sleepy 2015 terror tale Pay the Ghost is sadly representative of Cage’s output from this era. It casts him as Mike Lawford, a passionate New York professor with a flourishing career and a happy, attractive family in wife Kristen (Sarah Wayne Callies) and son Charlie (Jack Fulton).
Then one awful Halloween everything changes when his son mumbles something cryptic about paying a ghost and when he looks down he discovers that his son is gone. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. In a heartbeat your world changes and you’re suddenly rocked with an emptiness and an incredible feeling of failure and shame because you’ve come up hopelessly short in your most important job: keeping your child safe from a world overflowing with danger.
I know. We lost our younger son Harris for about twenty minutes and our dog for about twelve hours a few years back and I’m still haunted by both experiences and always will be. And I got my baby and my dog back! I can only imagine how agonizing it must be to lose your child or pet permanently.
Entertainment about lost children consequently yank relentlessly and cheaply at the heartstrings because it knows what a powerful visceral connection parents have to their subject matter. I’ve written extensively about how this stage of Cage’s career is defined by a pervasive, predictable and dispiriting awfulness and an obsession with fatherhood both literal and figurative.
Pay the Ghost is no different. Despite Cage’s gifts as an actor and the cheap potency of lost child narratives the absent child at the film’s rancid center is never anything more than a manipulative plot point.
Without it, there would be no film. With it, there’s still barely a film. A year later Cage’s grief-stricken academic is haunted by images of Charlie in the pirate costume he was wearing when he disappeared.
He is particularly fixated on the phrase “pay the ghost”, which he keeps encountering in different forms. Mike investigates this paranormal activity and discovers that his son’s disappearance, and the disappearance of various other local moppets, may be related to a Celtic woman being burned alive with her three children for her beliefs on Halloween night, 1679.
As revenge, this unfortunate woman who is also a victim while remaining a #girlboss yanks three children from the land of the living but then the next Halloween they can be yanked back when the borders between worlds briefly dissipate.
Our hero is trapped between worlds, not unlike in the 2018 Nicolas Cage supernatural thriller Between Worlds. He wants to yank his son back into our universe during the very narrow window during which it is possible to do so.
If you do not want Pay the Ghost “spoiled” stop reading now because honestly the end of Pay the Ghost is so fucking stupid that it legitimately made me angry. You know that a movie has failed on a profound, fundamental level when it revolves around a missing child and when he’s finally joyously reunited with his parents all you can think about is just how much trouble they’re going to be in.
I’m sorry, but your child can’t go missing FOR A SOLID YEAR and then reappear around Halloween with no memory of anything that has transpired in the ensuing time and not have CPS investigating the holy living shit out of you for being the world’s sketchiest parent.
“I know it looks weird that my kid went AWOL for three hundred and sixty five days and then showed up wearing the exact same clothes as when he went missing but he was with a ghost who was angry about getting burned a few hundred years ago but now my child is back so I don’t think anyone has to look into the matter too closely, or at all” just is not going to cut it with the child protective services people.
They don’t want weird, unconvincing supernatural excuses. They just want to see your child. Mike Lawford’s lukewarm adventures in the afterworld plays like rehashed What Dreams May Come with a generic horror flair.
Pay the Ghost casts one of the most talented and charismatic actors in the history of American film for a role that seemingly ANYONE could have played just as well. Matthew Modine! Kevin Connolly! The guy who played Turtle on Entourage. An actual turtle. All would have done just as well as Cage in a thankless and impossible role.
Unlike The Wicker Man, Pay the Ghost doesn’t even have the decency to be bad in a fun, memorable and highly quotable/meme-friendly fashion. It just sucks. It’s a low-energy loser from a man who was thankfully about to show the word that he was cable of a whole lot more with his high-energy, high-intensity comeback cult classics Mom and Dad and Mandy.
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