Haunted Mansion (2023)

Year 17, Day 288 - 10/15/25 - Movie #5,171

BEFORE: Well, I was forced to cut the "Hocus Pocus" movies from the horror chain because the link I was using was no good, which caused some emergency transplant surgery - four films out and four other films in, two Disney "horror" films out, and one Disney film in as part of the transplant to re-connect the open ends of the chain. Unfortunately this means I'm stranding a fair number of films tonight, like "The Haunting" and one of the "Predator" movies, but those are the breaks. Today's film got stranded last year when I watched "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice", it happens. A few films just need to be moved back down to the "Someday/Maybe" portion of the list, but the important thing is that the chain continues. With just 30 films left in the year, there's no way I'm going to let that drop now. 

Christopher Winchester carries over from "Renfield", just to play a bartender in one scene of this movie, but it counts. That's not much of a link, but it keeps the chain alive. 

THE PLOT: A single mother hires a tour guide, a psychic, a priest and a historian to help exorcise her newly-bought mansion after discovering it is inhabited by ghosts. 

AFTER: Disney Studios is just going to keep making movies with this title every twenty years, from now until the end of time, because they think that's going to keep the "Haunted Mansion" ride at their theme parks relevant somehow. Most of the rides are based on Disney films, of course, but they had success reverse-engineering things with the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies BASED ON THE RIDE, so they keep thinking lightning's going to strike twice in the same place, and sorry, that's just not how these things work. 

It seems that Guillermo del Toro wanted to make a version of this movie back in 2010, which could have been a real coup for Disney to own his work, I mean to "work with him" but I think at some point he either got bored with the whole idea or perhaps he figured out that if you work for Disney, they own your work, and you don't. The film spent 10 years in development hell after that, but eventually came back to life, you know, like a thing, a dead thing that is still sort of alive, I know there's a word for it but it's just not coming to me right now. Like a zombie? No, that's not it. 

Del Toro's script was ultimately deemed to be too scary, nobody gave him the memo that states that Disney films need to be family-friendly, so I guess ghosts are fine because they can scare you but they can't actually hurt you, still there are plot points here about characters like Madame Leota chopping up her five husbands, so, umm, WTF, Disney?  Other parts of the story had to bend themselves over backwards so that the ghosts seen here would match the ones seen in the amusement park ride, because they didn't want to spend more money to change the RIDE to match the MOVIE. Yeah, this is kind of why "Jungle Cruise" tanked, because instead of making a great movie, they were more concerned with making a movie that would remind you of the ride. 

Also, in addition to ghosts there are a TON of product placement mentions in "Haunted Mansion", from Amazon to Zillow and everything in-between. That's not just a seance candle, it's a Yankee Candle, even if the medium complains about that, she still mentioned it, ka-CHING! Burger King, CVS, Benihana, Baskin-Robbins, the list goes on and on and is pretty shameless. The kicker comes, though, when you learn that the film was scheduled to open just days after the SAG-AFTRA strike, so none of the film's stars were able to make promotional appearances. Also, who the hell opens a Halloween-like film in JULY? Bad timing, really - in addition the "Barbie/Oppenheimer" dual screenings were catching on, so really, that month for just about everyone, seeing "Haunted Mansion" was third priority on their to-do list, at best.

The story is WAY more complicated than it needed to be. People die, they become ghosts, they haunt you because they died incomplete, there was something they didn't do or say, so their spirits can't move on to the next world. That should be fairly simple, but everything here is at least ten times more complex than that.  The ghosts haunt the mansion, but then anyone who visits the mansion gets haunted at home, too, which makes no sense, ghosts, if they exist, are usually thought of as location-specific.  They haunt the place they died, or maybe they track down the person who killed them and haunt THAT person's house, but they usually don't just continue leading their lives as if they don't understand that they're not dead. Maybe once in a while they'll go haunt a miserly moneylender on Christmas Eve, but that's probably an extreme circumstance. 

So the mother who bought the haunted mansion tried to leave, but the ghosts followed her everywhere. So illogically she decided to return to the mansion with her son and try to make the best of it. Guys, that makes NO sense. This is like saying, "Hey, the forest is on fire, so let's go camping!" But she contacts a priest to arrange an exorcism, and he tracks down widower Ben Matthias, who at some point developed a camera that could detect dark matter, and accidently instead (or in addition to) it can also photograph ghosts. Umm, he thinks. Since Ben doesn't believe in ghosts, he really had no interest in testing it, not until somebody paid him $2,000 to do just that. Ben and Father Kent also hire a psychic and a local historian to help them figure out why this place in particular is haunted. 

It seems the owner of the Mansion, Mr. Gracey, was convinced by a ghost to commit suicide - same goes for Madame Leota, who fell into the same trap and now is forced to inhabit a crystal ball for all eternity, answering stupid questions from modern-day first-time homeowners. It seems that the house contains these spirits and 997 other souls like them, if they can only get ONE more the house will have 1,000 and then, I don't know, they can all get free delivery from GrubHub or something, or share one Disney+ account and save a ton of money. 

What the main characters have to do to FIX everything is the most complicated of all, it's not as easy as the Venn diagram that one character makes where one circle is "the real world" and the other circle is "the great beyond" and the space where the two circles overlap is, well, the "Haunted Mansion". See, that was easy to explain, why couldn't the whole movie be a bunch of easy, junk science like that? Instead they have to convince the ghosts to rebel against their master, climb up an eternally-expanding wall, fight some Louisiana alligators, hold a seance in a room that doesn't exist and run through the mansions hallways that keep getting longer and longer and don't ever end. Then they have to go to a completely DIFFERENT mansion that's an hour's drive away to find a missing top hat and keep it from burning up in a fireplace, because it's somehow the thing they need to use to cast the banishment ritual, who made up all these dumb, overly complicated rules anyway? Ugh, I'm just exhausted after all that, if fighting ghosts is this complicated it's probably easier just to give up and learn to live with them in your house! Which they still kind of end up doing, so what is the damn point of all of this?

I've been to New Orleans, I've been on that walking ghost tour, and, well, we didn't see any ghosts, it's just not possible. instead we heard stories about some of the supposedly-haunted buildings around the city, mostly though it was about a lot of murders where the bodies weren't found until 100 or so years later. You know, happy stories, others involved voodoo but mostly it was all about murders, so maybe leave the kiddoes at the hotel, just saying. But it is a great city to visit in October, what with their above-ground graveyards and their Bourbon Street drink specials. Beignets, too, don't forget the beignets - but I tried the most famous foods of New Orleans like gumbo, etouffé and muffaletta sandwiches, and I wasn't all that impressed. I had a great shrimp po'boy but that was about it. 

Directed by Justin Simien

Also starring LaKeith Stanfield (last seen in "Dope"), Rosario Dawson (last seen in "10 Years"), Owen Wilson (last seen in "The Minus Man"), Tiffany Haddish (last seen in "Easter Sunday"), Danny DeVito (last seen in "Dear Ms.: A Revolution in Print"), Jamie Lee Curtis (last seen in "The Fog" (1980)), Chase W. Dillon (last seen in "The Harder They Fall"), Jared Leto (last seen in "Mr. Nobody"), J.R. Adduci, Creek Wilson (last seen in "We Have a Ghost"), Ben Bladon (last seen in "Zola"), Lindsay Lamb, Charity Jordan (last seen in "The Piano Lesson"), Fedor Steer (last seen in "Doctor Sleep"), Terence Rosemore (last seen in "Nickel Boys"), Gralen Bryant Banks (ditto), Mike Benitez (last seen in "Omni Loop"), Erika Coleman, Antonino Paone (last seen in "Are You Here"), Julie Nalibov, Kathi Callahan, Hector Machado, Steve Zissis (last seen in "The Do-Deca-Pentathlon"), Andrew Morgado (last seen in "Unhinged"), William Calvert, Glendon Hobgood (last seen in "The Campaign"), Lorenzo Beronilla (last seen in "Then Came You"), Amy Parrish (last seen in "Reptile"), Kurt Yue (ditto), Hasan Minhaj (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), Charles Black (last seen in "The Best of Enemies"), Chad Crumley, Sebastien Soudais (last seen in "Jackpot!"), John Curran (last seen in "One Night in Miami..."), Tracy Goode, Bryan McClure, Don Stallings (last seen in "Brothers"), Ashley John, Rick Andosca (last seen in "Shazam! Fury of the Gods"), Kat Montes, Kamra Kam Shaikh, Jared Simon, Joseph Frew-Miller, Kay Galvin, and the voice of Terence Mathews, 

with cameos from Marilu Henner (last seen in "I Am Burt Reynolds"), Jo Koy (last heard in "The Monkey King"), Dan Levy (last seen in "Good Grief"), Winona Ryder (last seen in "Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story")

RATING: 5 out of 10 discount-store action figures