There’s an infamous anecdote about a scientist who was presenting a lecture on how earth and other celestial bodies orbit around larger bodies. When he finished the lecture, an old lady supposedly stood up and claimed that the scientist was wrong because the world wasn’t floating in outer space but was in fact supported on the back of a giant turtle. When asked what was supporting the turtle, the old lady replied: “it’s turtles all the way down.”
While this story is often used to explain the concept of an infinite regress, it’s also a great example of how the simulation hypothesis – the idea that the universe as we know it is a kind of virtual reality – is actually much older than the modern concept of computers.
However, it was only with the technological advances of the 90s that this idea became prevalent in popular culture and caught on with general audiences. Obviously, the unprecedented success of the Wachowski sisters’ The Matrix had something to do with this, but Neo’s story was merely the most popular example of a (then) growing trend of simulation-focused cinema.
And while everyone’s heard of eXistenZ and Dark City, today I’d like to discuss one of the more obscure movies about simulated reality, Josef Rusnak’s neo-noir murder mystery, The Thirteenth Floor.
Heavily inspired by Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel Simulacron-3 (which told the story of a completely functional virtual city developed for dystopic market research), the film that would become The Thirteenth Floor began life as a passion project by Rusnack and co-writer Ravel Centeno-Rodriguez. Impressed with their work, disaster film veteran Roland Emmerich decided to produce the movie through his German-American studio, Centropolis Entertainment.
In the finished picture, we follow Douglas Hall (Craig Bierko) in late 90s Los Angeles as the sole suspect in the murder of his tech billionaire mentor Hannon Fuller (Armin Mueller-Stahl). In an attempt to clear his name, Hall partners with Fuller’s daughter Jane (Gretchen Mol) and his friend Whitney (Vincent D’Onofrio) and proceeds to investigate Fuller’s final project: a virtual reality simulation of LA in 1937. What follows is a mind-bending mystery thriller that has our protagonist questioning everything he knows about himself and the world around him.
AND WHAT MAKES IT WORTH WATCHING?
While I can’t honestly sit here and argue that The Thirteenth Floor is an unsung masterpiece, I do think that it garnered an unfair reputation as a dud due to it releasing a mere month after The Matrix. Sure, the flick doesn’t boast the same level of production value and mass audience appeal as some of its peers, but that’s no reason to dismiss a legitimately engaging story.
Despite the lack of memorable action set-pieces, the fact that the flick isn’t content with simply using the simulation set-up as a gimmicky plot-twist already makes the experience worth the price of admission. You know what the film is about from the very beginning, with Rusnak preferring to delve into the philosophical and theological implications of nested realities as Hall realizes that a mysterious force has been playing God with his life while he does the same with the digital denizens of 1939 LA.
The sci-fi technobabble and general setup doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny (I mean, how does the virtual world look so good in ’99 when we know that three-dimensional graphics from that era looked like amorphous blobs of primitive polygons?), and the pacing can be rather slow at times, but I still think the film is compelling enough to overlook these minor flaws. In fact, I’m not the only one who thinks so, with notable philosopher Slavoj Žižek having publicly defended the film and claimed that it was better than The Matrix when it came to exploring the consequences of the simulation hypothesis.
Personally, a lot of my good will towards the film comes from an appreciation of its meticulously crafted atmosphere. I’m a sucker for classic noir ambience and The Thirteenth Floor delivers in spades even if the effects budget can’t quite keep up with the filmmakers’ ambitions. That being said, I find it easy to forgive some questionable digital effects work given the movie’s computerized subject matter.
Of course, none of this would matter if we didn’t care about these characters, so it’s fortunate that the flick boasts likable character actors like Gretchen Mol and Vincent D’Onofrio to liven up a script that admittedly focuses more on the esoteric elements of the narrative than the humanity that motivates it.
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Despite the concept’s popularity, a majority of scientists agree that the simulation hypothesis is inherently unscientific, as suspecting that our reality is a digital facsimile doesn’t actually change anything about how we interact with the universe. However, there are some dissenting voices who bring up a series of disturbing implications about the idea. For example, exactly how much agency do we have if the entire world is pre-programmed, and what happens to everyone if the simulation is turned off?
It’s precisely this kind of existential thinking that makes The Thirteenth Floor such a compelling experience. Where most of the famous simulation movies involve some kind of power fantasy as the protagonist takes control of their environment, Rusnak’s film prefers to dwell on the helplessness of realizing that everything you know is a lie.
From the main character’s steadily declining sanity to the very notion that someone can take over your body and forcibly turn you into a criminal, there are plenty of disturbing concepts to go around here, especially when you pair these ideas with the film’s murder mystery elements. In act, I’d argue that this exceedingly dreary tone might also have had something to do with the flick’s poor reception at the time of release.
The Thirteenth Floor may not reach the same heights as some of its peers, but that certainly doesn’t make it a bad movie, and I’m glad that it’s developed something of a cult following in recent years. And with the film revealing that most of the story actually took place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to look back on this simulation-based oddity and draw your own conclusions about the nature of reality.
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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