Cyrus Kriticos

Cyrus Kriticos is a ghost hunter and the main antagonist of Thir13en Ghosts. He is played by F. Murray Abraham.

Biography
At an unknown point, Cyrus and his secret lover, Kalina Oretzia discovered the Arcanum and Cyrus created Basileus's Machine in the form of a mansion from the blueprints in the Arcanum. With a team which included Dennis Rafkin, Cyrus captured twelve earth-bound souls and had them moved to the basement of the house to become twelve of the thirteen ghosts in the Black Zodiac.

During the capture of the twelfth ghost, in the ensuing chaos, Cyrus and Kalina killed Kalina's fellow spirit liberator for the tape-recorded Latin chant (needed to cause the captive ghosts to use their life force to power up the machine) and faked Cyrus's death via decapitation.

Cyrus pretended that his nephew, Arthur and his family had inherited Cyrus's supposed mansion, so that Arthur would become the thirteenth ghost. While Kalina protected Arthur from the rampant ghosts (as the machine required a ghost who committed suicide out of an act of pure love to represent the Broken Heart), Cyrus abducted Arthur's children, Bobby and Kathy to cause Arthur to become the Broken Heart.

Cyrus arrived at the machine's core, and ordered Kalina to put Bobby and Kathy in jeopardy in order to make Arthur the Broken Heart, before playing a Latin chant throughout the house which caused the twelve rampant ghosts to go to the core and power up the machine. He then crushed Kalna between two glass walls in cold blood (because she balked at his orders to put Bobby and Kathy in jeopardy earlier), saying that greatness requires sacrifice.

When Arthur arrived and noticed from the twelve ghosts that Cyrus was alive and not a ghost, the two had a vicious confrontation which ended when Maggie freed the ghosts from their trance. The furious ghosts then grabbed Cyrus and threw him into the core of the machine, slicing him to pieces.