Director – Justin Simien, Screenplay – Katie Dippold, Producers – Jonathan Eirich & Dan Lin, Photography – Jeffrey Waldron, Music – Kris Bowers, Visual Effects Supervisor – Edwin Rivera, Visual Effects/Animation – Industrial Light & Magic (Supervisor – Bill Georgiou), Visual Effects – DNeg (Supervisors – George Lakner & Sebastian Von Overheidt), Special Effects Supervisor – Dan Sudick, Prosthetics Designers – Daniel Carrasco & Sadan Vague, Production Design – Darren Gilford. Production Company – Disney/Rideback Productions.
Cast
LaKeith Stanfield (Ben Matthias), Rosario Dawson (Gabbie), Owen Wilson (Father Kent), Tiffany Hadish (Harriet), Danny DeVito (Bruce Davis), Chase W. Dillon (Travis), Jamie Lee Curtis (Madame Leota), Jared Leto (Alistair Crump/The Hatbox Ghost), J.R. Adduci (William Gracey), Charity Jordan (Alyssa), Marilu Henner (Carol), Kathy Callahan (Carol)
Plot
Ben Matthias is a former astrophysicist now working as an historic tour guide in New Orleans, following the death of his wife Alyssa. He is approached by the priest Father Kent who wants to hire Ben to go to Gracey Manor and photograph the ghosts that the new owner Gabbie claims are haunting the house. Ben accepts the offer of $2000 and goes. He can see nothing but fakes taking the photos. However, when he leaves, he is haunted by ghostly apparitions everywhere and is forced to return. Convinced of the actuality of the ghosts, he gathers a team that includes the medium Harriet and the historian Bruce Davis. Together they set out to investigate what haunts the mansion. They discover the house’s former owner Alistair Crump dominates all the other ghosts and has collected 999 souls under the house’s roof. He needs to collect one further soul so that he can escape and intends it to be one of them.
While the 2003 film is largely forgotten, what does seem to escape most people is that it was a reasonable success and earned $182 million worldwide. For whatever reasons, Disney did not immediately spawn of a series of sequels as they had with Pirates of the Caribbean. Throughout the 2010s, Guillermo Del Toro planned a new Haunted Mansion film, which was purportedly to star Ryan Gosling but dropped out. The new director is Justin Simien who previously made Dear White People (2014) and the horror film Bad Hair (2020). On the other hand, the 2023 film did nothing to reignite the franchise, earning a decent $114 million at the box-office but never creeping above being the third top-earning film in the US during its theatrical run.
Haunted Mansion emerges as a different take on the same than The Haunted Mansion did. Both use more or less the same locale and incorporate various features of the ride’s exhibits. The Haunted Mansion 2003 came in a light comedic vein – little more than a children’s Halloween special – whereas this version plays itself relatively more serious, although no more scarily. There are assorted comedy actors introduced – Danny DeVito and Owen Wilson, unconvincingly cast as a priest – but this film never coalesces into much of a comedy, apart from several assorted slapstick routines running around and being propelled through the grounds by ghostly furniture.
(l to r) Rosario Dawson, Tiffany Hadish, LaKeith Stanfield and Owen Wilson in the Gracey Mansion
One standout thing this version offers is some excellent production design. The interiors of the house trail off into a perspective where it looks as though the filmmakers were using an entire soundstage, if not more than one, to construct their sets – indeed, the hallways seem to go on for so long, the length of some streets, that they seem far larger than the exteriors of the house we get. And that’s before things start to turn into an Escher-esque nightmare with walls abruptly shifting about, hallways rotating to different angles and the like.
This film is much sombre in tone than the lightness of the 2003 film. It is more substantial in terms of story, featuring a script from Katie Dippold who wrote Ghostbusters (2016) and The Heat (2023). In the 2003 film, Eddie Murphy and family more or less stumble into the mansion, whereas here LaKeith Stanfield is hired as a paranormal investigator and must assemble a team, making the film akin to a more comedic variation of The Haunting (1963) or The Legend of Hell House (1973). LaKeith is given a backstory of unresolved grief, while Dippold’s script also makes much more of an effort to tie the various ghosts and apparitions inhabiting the house into a coherent rationale.
All of that said, while it is still a laudable production in many respects, the film is still stuck as being a haunted house comedy that is neither enough of one or the other. There is an impressive enough house but there is certainly not enough of substance to raise even a mild goosebump for horror fans. The more sombre tone soft pedals the comedy element such that when ghosts with neon-coloured glowing heads appear and people are being spun around in tilt-a-whirl corridors they are elements that seem to have strayed in from another film.
