Timothy Glaraton
Confession time: Disney’s string of films based on iconic rides have long been a guilty pleasure of mine. What can I say? I’m a Disney kid at heart, some of my fondest memories from childhood were the trips taken to Disney World with my family every few years, and believe it or not most of them are surprisingly decent films in my eyes. Jungle Cruise is a fun Indiana Jones/Uncharted-style pulp adventure, 1997’s Tower of Terror is a delightfully weird slice of made-for-tv horror, and despite getting weighed down by convoluted lore in later entries I’m always down for a Pirates of the Caribbean binge.
Disney’s latest ride-turned film is one that is near and dear to my heart: Haunted Mansion, based on perhaps the world’s most famous haunted house attraction. This isn’t the first time that Disney has taken on this particular ride, having made a film in 2003 with Eddie Murphy that I—to double down on my probably-in-the-minority opinions—found to be a wonderfully enjoyable piece of horror comedy. But this time around, the studio looks to be taking a much different approach.
The focus of Haunted Mansion’s first teaser is, for lack of a better word, authenticity. 2003’s The Haunted Mansion had a heavier focus on comically convoluted lore, and while it’s entertaining enough it only feels loosely related to the actual attraction, and while that approach might have worked for Pirates of the Caribbean it didn’t click with audiences in that original film. If this first teaser is anything to go off of, Haunted Mansion (2023) looks to be much simpler in terms of story and more focused on bringing the ride to life.
The teaser is full of moments that aren’t as much easter eggs to the Haunted Mansion ride as much as they are one-to-one recreations: the iconic exterior of the original Disneyland house, with its four towering white columns in the front and its swampy, New Orleans Square style setting, setpieces like the Endless Hallway and the Stretching Room, familiar ghosts like The Bride, the Hatbox Ghost and the Organ Player, even smaller pieces like the changing portraits and the clock chiming thirteen. The whole thing is set to Roy Orbison’s “House Without Windows”, and as much as I despise how seemingly every Disney and Marvel trailer now feels the need to feature some old pop song (it was a cool, unique thing when Guardians of the Galaxy did it and it should have stayed a cool, unique thing to Guardians of the Galaxy, the old man yelled at the cloud)… I mean come on, it’s Roy freaking Orbison, which makes it okay.
Storywise, Haunted Mansion follows a woman and her son who move into the titular mansion and wind up hiring a team of eccentric ghost hunters to try and rid the house of its… previous inhabitants, with a cast of heavy hitters featuring the likes of Owen Wilson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tiffany Haddish, Rosario Dawson, LaKeith Stanfield, and a clearly-having-the-time-of-his-life Danny DeVito.
Jared Leto is also there, I guess.
Is it going to be high art, cerebral cinema that people will talk about in the same breath as Citizen Kane or Vertigo years from now? No, not by a long shot, but doggone it, Haunted Mansion certainly looks to be a howling good time for the whole family, and catnip for the Disney segment of my brain. Haunted Mansion will be appearing in theaters “soon,” and I can hardly wait to see it about half a dozen times.
