| “ | I'm a salvager, just like you. You collect ships, I collect souls. And when I filled my quota, I sent the boatload home. This will make management happy. You see it's a job, given to me after a lifetime of sin. | „ |
| ~ Jack Ferriman to Maureen Epps. |
Jack Ferriman is a demonic seafaring collector of souls that controls the haunted cruise liner Antonio Graza and the main antagonist of the 2002 supernatural horror movie remake Ghost Ship.
He was portrayed by Desmond Harrington.
Plot
In the May of 1962, dozens of wealthy 600 European passengers along with 200 Italian crew members aboard, are dancing in the ballroom of an Italian ocean liner, the Antonia Graza, while an Italian woman named Francesca sings "Senza Fine". On the deck, a young girl named Katie Harwood, is sitting alone, until the Captain of the ship himself offers the dance. Elsewhere, a hand presses a lever that unravels a thin wire cord from a spool. The spool snaps and the wire slices across the dance floor like a blade, bisecting the dancers. Only Katie is spared, due to the Captain leaning protectively over her, and her height. The Captain's face splits open at mouth level as the top of his head falls off as Katie screams in horror.
40 years later, a boat salvage crew—Cpt. Sean Murphy, Maureen Epps, Greer, Dodge, Munder, and Santos, is celebrating a recent success at a bar, when Jack Ferriman, a Canadian weather service 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 port.
The crew sets out on their ship, the Arctic Warrior, an ocean salvage tugboat. They discover the ship is the Antonia Graza, which mysteriously disappeared in 1962 and was believed to be lost at sea, as both the crew and the passengers were never heard from again. When they board the ship and prepare to tow it, they discover that it contains a large quantity of gold. However strange things begin to happen. Epps claims to have seen a little girl on the stairwell. The crew find a digital watch on the bridge and Greer claims to have heard a woman singing throughout the ship. Epps and Ferriman discover the corpses of another salvage crew. They decide to leave the ship but take the gold, but an invisible force opens a gas valve in the engine room and the Arctic Warrior explodes as the engine is started, killing Santos and leaving them stranded.
They attempt to fix the Antonia Graza and sail it back to land, but the crew members are picked off one by one. Greer meets Francesca, the singer who he heard, who seduces him and then leads him off a precipice to his death. Captain Murphy, after entering the Captains Cabin, comes across the ghost of the Antonia Graza's Captain, who explains that they recovered the gold from a sinking cruiseship Lorelei, along with a sole survivor. He shows Murphy a picture of the survivor, who he is shocked to recognise. He rushes to tell the rest of the crew, but a supernatural force causes him to see everyone he meets as the burned ghost of Santos, causing the crew to think he has gone mad and lock him in the drained fish tank.
Meanwhile, Epps meets Katie, who reveals (via flashback) that the crew of Graza turned on the passengers and each other. The sole survivor of the Lorelei convinced the crew of the Graza to turn on the passengers in order to claim the gold. The crew killed all of the passengers (by means of rat poison in the food, the razor wire, and then slaughtering all who remained), including Katie (hanging her in a closet), but then turned on each other. The last officer, after killing his crew mates was shot by the singer, Francesca. Another man then joined Francesca in an embrace and walked away as a large hook swung into her face, killing her. The man is revealed (through a shot of the photos Murphy received from the Graza's Captain) as Jack Ferriman, who is actually a demonic spirit who masterminded the massacre in 1962 and may have done something similar on the Lorelei.
Epps deduces that Ferriman lured the salvage team to the Graza to repair the sinking ship, and that the best way to fight him is to sink it. She sets explosives, but is confronted by Ferriman, who has killed the last of her crew. Ferriman describes himself as a salvager of souls; collecting souls is his job, which he says he earned by a lifetime of sin. He explains that since Katie was a child and never committed a true sin as the same with her other adult fellow shipmates without wickedness in their hearts, he can never control her and the other innocent spirits as he does with the evil ghosts. So long as the Antonia Graza remains afloat, he can continue to use it as a trap and keep his hellish masters (and Satan) satisfied and happy. After a brief struggle, Epps detonates the explosives and sinks the Graza. Katie helps Epps escape the rapidly sinking ship. She is left in the debris as the souls trapped on the ship ascend to heaven; Katie stops to thank her.
After drifting on the open sea for some time, Epps is found by a cruise ship and taken back to land. As she was loaded into an ambulance, she sees the battered crates of gold being loaded onto the cruise ship by Ferriman and members that look like but are not her fallen crew members. Ferriman glares at her and carries on; she screams "no!" as the ambulance doors close. Ferriman continues on to finding a new ship to aboard and control and to collect more lives.
Gallery
Trivia
- Jack Ferriman's last name is an alias of the mythological boatman Charon.
- Though Jack and Francesca serve as the Big Bad Duumvirate, Jack is the Bigger Bad of the two.
- Jack Ferriman is quite similar to Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog; they both serve supernatural entities and wish to make them happy, and to that end, they collect souls via manipulation. Difference being, Jack survives while Facilier doesn't.