Haunted Mansion
DISNEY*This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes.
Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.*
Twenty years after Eddie Murphy entered the doors of the Haunted Mansion, Disney reimagines the ride as a film adaptation once more, this time released July 28, 2023 as Barbenheimer is sweeping the world. Whoever decided to put that movie there is hopefully fired, as it will get eviscerated at the box office no matter how good it is. Credit where credit is due, the cast assembled for this take on the Haunted Mansion is certainly very attractive: LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Danny DeVito, Owen Wilson, Jamie Lee Curtis, the list goes on. And everyone who is a part of this incredible ensemble bring their A-game inside a visually exciting, albeit way too long, re-creation of the ride’s greatest hits that starts to lose its momentum as it progresses near its end.
Regardless of what anyone thinks of Rob Minkoff’s Haunted Mansion, it ran at a lean 87 minutes and cleared all of the boxes it needed to check for a fun time at the movies. It isn’t the greatest movie in the world, but it did its job of entertaining and slightly spooking younger viewers, despite what the 13% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes apparently states otherwise. Justin Simien’s Haunted Mansion (notice how this title loses its “The” to differentiate it from Eddie Murphy’s film) runs at 123 minutes, and the jig gets quite tiresome when its plot stretches itself to no end.
There was literally a moment in which the film leads itself to the climax, but instead decides to take a detour to learn more about the antagonist’s backstory. That detour alone has two major cameos from A-listers that TV viewers and nostalgic moviegoers may recognize, but it doesn’t add anything concrete to the story, or to the threat of The Hatbox Ghost (Jared Leto), who has trapped a group of people inside his mansion. There’s astrophycisist Ben Matthias (LaKeith Stanfield), priest Kent (Owen Wilson), psychic Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), historian Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito), and Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon), who moved to the mansion without realizing it is haunted.
The gang must team up together to stop The Hatbox Ghost from killing one soul needed to escape the mansion, and that’s where most of the haunted hijinks ensure. Visually, Simien and cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron step up their game from the 2003 film and give its reimagining a more refined and exciting visual palette. The dark, neon-lit rooms naturally distort themselves as the ghosts play tricks around the guests, while editor Phillip J. Bartell naturally represents this discombobulation through perfectly-timed match cuts.
One scene which sees Ben accidentally astral projecting his spirit inside the Ghost’s realm is the film’s most thrilling setpiece, utilizing a wide array of practical and digital tricks to put the viewer in the character’s perspective as he discovers a world beyond the living. The visual effects are also excellent. It’s a great change of pace from what Disney usually churns out these days, and there’s a great sense of skill in how they’re incorporated into the story. Simien also goes the extra mile in crafting some pretty effective scares, which likely garnered the film its PG-13 rating. Of course, families who want a milder time in the Haunted Mansion should seek out the Murphy version instead, but the latest version has a surprising amount of maturity in trying to petrify younger viewers. It may well act as a gateway to horror cinema for susceptible cinephiles, and that aspect should always be celebrated.
With its box office results, it’s unclear if Disney will ever take a risk like this ever again, but the fact that Simien leaned into the gothic aspects of a Haunted House movie (Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak comes to mind) instead of being more family-friendly with his scares is something that large studio filmmaking do not do anymore at this scale, because it’s seemingly “risky.” If studio filmmaking should evolve, it needs to take some form of risk. In its visual style, Haunted Mansion is unmatched, and it could indeed be Disney’s most visually stunning film in a very long time.
It’s also helpful that each cast member has their time to shine. Stanfield is a natural comic, and his timing here is impeccable, alongside another exuberant performance from DeVito and Wilson channeling a variant of Mobius M. Mobius from Loki as a priest. They’re having a good time, and the audience is also investing themselves into the characters as the film moves from one setpiece to the next. But the real star of the picture is Chase W. Dillon. The 13-year-old breakout star from Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad gives a performance of incredible emotional complexity as a child who longs for his father to return to him while he struggles with his social skills at school and with his classmates. There are a few moving moments with him and Stanfield that quasi-construct a fatherly bond between Ben and Travis, and they’re the most heartfelt parts of the film.
It’s just a shame that some of that emotional progression gets hindered by some of the most eye-rolling and shameless product placement ever seen in a modern blockbuster to date. No kidding: when Ben discusses his wife’s death, he stops to point out that she went to get ice cream at Baskin’ Robbins. That’s one of many egregious attempts of shoving as many products as possible down the audience’s throat: Haddish’s Harriet specifically discussing her pen and paper she bought from CVS, or sage from Costco, a bottle of Zatarain’s seasoning getting mixed into scrambled eggs in slow-motion, Yankee Candles bought from Amazon, the list goes on. It’s as shameless as it comes, and ruins most of the jokes and one crucial emotional beat.
And then there’s the villain, who feels more weightless and perfunctory than Terence Stamp and Nathaniel Richards in the 2003 original. Leto gets memed to death on social media, but as an actor, he has held his own with captivating performances in The Little Things and Dallas Buyers Club. Here, he seems to channel his inner Michael Morbius to deliver yet another forgettable floating head who growls a lot and speaks in a bass-boosted voice, but doesn’t do anything else beyond that. Plus, his arc is so amazingly clichéd that audiences can quickly figure out how the film will end, even if the acting from everyone else is quite decent.
However, by the time Haunted Mansion gets to its CGI-filled climax, a sense of exhaustion and familiarity plagues the viewer. Yes, it’s technically well-made and contains some good performances from most of its cast, but what else does it have to offer, aside from the product placement and endless scary scenes? Most of the action scenes become extremely repetitive as time goes on, and the story takes too many detours for its effectiveness to start to dilute itself and become, well, quite dull. Had it been as lean as the Murphy version, it would’ve been a great time at the movies and a future Halloween classic, but alas, it’ll be forgotten as quickly as theatres will stop playing it…