IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Released: 31st August
Seen: 21st September
The Haunted Mansion is probably one of the most famous theme park attractions of all time. It’s so well known that even people who have never actually visited the park it’s built in at least know a few of its iconic visuals, like the ballroom full of ghosts or the elongating rooms. It’s such an iconic ride that it was inevitable that it’d inspire a movie and in 2003 it ended up doing so with The Haunted Mansion, a film that was certainly financially successful but was critically panned and not looked back on fondly by most (though it does have a cult following). The property would remain untouched in cinematic form for years until 2021 when the Muppets took a crack at it and, while their version only lasted a little under an hour, it was still well received by a lot of people and maybe gave Disney confidence they needed to really believe in another cinematic version of Haunted Mansion… and it’s a good thing they did because the new version is surprisingly good.
Haunted Mansion begins with widowed mother Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) moving into a new house, a large old-looking mansion that at first seems to be just needing a little cleaning but actually is just haunted by hundreds upon hundreds of ghosts. While they would like to just run away, it turns out they really can’t so Gabbie ends up needing some help. Enter Ben Matthias (LaKeith Stanfield), a recent widower who was an astrophysicist and invented a camera that lets him see ghosts. He, along with Father Kent (Owen Wilson), Harriet the medium (Tiffany Haddish) and Professor Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito) are all talked into coming to the mansion in order to help remove the ghosts that are making Gabbie and her son’s lives into living nightmares.
Part of what makes something like Haunted Mansion so hard to get right is that it needs to walk that fine line between scary and comedic in a way that’s accessible to the whole family. The original ride, for example, contains beautiful effects work but also is full of dark comedy and has a theme song that’s literally sung to the ride goer… in other words, no way can you treat this like a regular haunted house movie, it has a tone that needs to be hit just right and Haunted Mansion more often than not nails that tone. It manages to have some great moments of tension, cut it up with a few good quick jokes before building that tension up again. There are more than a few moments that are genuinely horrifying, some of the scares really work… sure, some don’t because when you look at some of the ghosts for too long they lose their effectiveness, but when it works, it works really well.
It helps that Haunted Mansion looks really good, the lighting in some scenes is so beautiful and gothic that it elevates the entire mood of the film. While some effects are a little outdated (especially when we have close-ups of ghosts that look like a leftover from the original Ghostbusters) there’s a certain strange charm to them that makes it work when combined with the strangeness of the house. It’s clearly a set of designs meant to scare a little at first but you quickly get used to them because Haunted Mansion is more aimed towards a family audience so it can’t push things too far, but it does go far enough to at least get a few little scares.
What Haunted Mansion really excels at is comedy, and with this cast that shouldn’t be a surprise. While LaKeith Stanfield seems to be handling the job of the straight man holding everything together, everyone else is firing on all cylinders just trying to make things work and usually succeeding. Tiffany Haddish is especially good at keeping the energy up, as is Owen Wilson and even Jamie Lee Curtis in her brief cameo as Madam Leota. They all are able to channel that comedic sensibility that makes them a joy to watch. Of course, Danny DeVito also pulls this off but he has barely any time at all, indeed it feels like they forget about him for a large amount of Haunted Mansion which is just wrong because if you have Danny DeVito in your cast then he should be in every scene you can fit him in. When he is actually taking part in the story of the film, he’s the same delight he always is but god damn it’s almost criminal how underused he is.
It also helps that Haunted Mansion has actually taken the time to think through the logic of some major elements of this film. There’s a good reason why everyone is sticking around, there’s an actual emotional storyline that the characters have to go on that gives them some actual gravitas. For a film full of dead people, it’s stunning that it took three iterations for someone to go “Hey maybe our leads should be dealing with grief and loss so there’s an actual connection to the world of the dead”. It’s wild that it took this long to work that out but it helps make a lot of scenes more powerful. It certainly gives LaKeith a few really great moments to work with, able to have some heartbreaking moments with only his eyes doing the work. It also helps create a more interesting and emotional climax which Haunted Mansion really needed to land in order to make everything work.
Haunted Mansion does exactly what it needs to do, a good blend of funny and family-friendly-scary with some cute effects and fun performances. It certainly isn’t going to be considered an all-time great but it’s perfectly enjoyable enough to delight most people for a few hours. It’s light and easygoing, full of heart and souls aplenty that’ll have you laughing loudly at least once. Sure, there are some flaws with it and some of the main cast feel underused, but it’s still a good time. With Halloween just around the corner, this is probably going to be revisited by a lot of pretty Grim Grinning Ghosts for years to come.
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