Originally published on October 21, 2023.

I may be a clown, yes, but I'm a clown who loves Halloween. I love scary movies, I adore haunted houses, I thrive in the chilly gray of an October morning. I also fucking love Disney World. I grew up poor, but my mom always set money aside for us to go to Disney, because she wanted my brother and I to be able to experience that magic - and my favorite ride in all of Disney World, despite being a scaredy-cat as a kid, was and still is the Haunted Mansion. There's a true foreboding feeling as you approach that gorgeous facade of brick and iron and glass; you know there's something scary inside but you can't avoid it, your morbid curiosity draws you inside past the hearse drawn by an invisible horse, and the headstones with ghoulishly funny epitaphs. The halls of the manor are cold and dark, a welcome respite from the heat of the Florida sun, and for a while you live in that mansion, absorbing the grim atmosphere, immersing yourself in the scary story you've found yourself trapped in - and being reminded that maybe death isn't all bad; those ghosts in the graveyard sure look like they're having fun.

Of course, my love for the Disney theme parks division does not extend to the corporate side of the entertainment juggernaut; as a lifelong Disney lover, it really hurts to see the slow and very deliberate slide into uncreative, soul-crushing, brand-recognition muck that the corporation, and its movie division, have been taking over the last ten years or so. I believe we can pin it on two things: the rise of the MCU, and the inexplicable success of 2014's Maleficent; the blockbuster homogeneity of the MCU filmmaking style, extremely calculated to be as widely crowd-pleasing as possible, has poisoned Disney media in a very real way, and Maleficent, despite not being a good movie, poisoned Disney's attitude toward their classic films forever and spawned the seemingly endless parade of soulless, careless, factory-processed live action remake slop that has plagued us ever since. The trend continues in 2023 with Haunted Mansion, a soulless and loveless adaptation of the beloved ride that collides with the worst qualities of Marvel filmmaking to create something akin to cinematic bologna: a pale, flavorless mush of unidentifiable parts ground up into an easily-digestible whole for people with no taste buds to consume mindlessly. It clearly holds no love for its source material beyond obvious financial gain, holds no love for haunted house movies as a genre, and is just, frankly, so badly edited it makes me wonder if anybody even watched a final cut before distribution.

Believe it or not, Zoomers, there was a time when Disney tried to make films, with, like, shit going on in them. Specifically in 2003, the House of Mouse released two movies based on their most beloved theme park rides, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and The Haunted Mansion. Now sure, we can take the cynical route and see these movies as commercials for the rides, for Disneyland itself, but the remarkable thing about both movies is that they're really good - they aren't at all just one-to-one recreations of the rides they're inspired by; both movies take inspiration from the rides and use that to develop their own unique stories. Something I find so spectacular about the rides is that they're still loved by fans and famous among theme parks, despite being wholly unconnected to any brand or marketable character (ignoring the Pirates refurbishment that added the completely immersion-breaking Jack Sparrow animatronics). Yes, I know that the rides themselves are the brands now and have been marketed to hell and back these days, but at the time of Disneyland's beginning, they were simply standalone attractions; they were experiences that transported the guests to a new world, and completely away from the theme park that surrounded them. When you break it down, the Haunted Mansion could have been any other carnival haunted house ride, the kind with strobe lights and crappy monster statues that lean at you with a scream as you pass by -- but the Imagineers who designed and built the Mansion did it with such love and care and flair, they elevated the simple haunted house ride to a degree that hasn't been matched by any other group since. In the world of 2023, when everything is branded and marketed and shoved in your face, where everything has to be part of a cinematic universe and where Disney+ gives you a fucking QR code to take you to a merch page for the movie you just watched, it's so refreshing to remember that the Haunted Mansion exists, a monument to creativity and imagination unbranded, with no annoyingly modern characters interrupting the classic atmosphere....

Which is exactly why the 2023 film Haunted Mansion is so disappointing, especially when compared to its 2003 predecessor starring Eddie Murphy. The original film, in the same vein as of the Black Pearl, takes inspiration from the ride but crafts its own unique mansion, with its own unique inhabitants and guests, its own unique conflict, to present a story separate from, but owing to, the ride with a clear respect that the new film seems to gleefully lack. The 2003 mansion is, first off, clearly a real set (a shocking concept, I know) where the actors can walk down real hallways and interact with real objects instead of impotently emoting at blue walls with no idea of what they're supposed to be looking at. It takes its time to establish its characters: a family with real-world issues, needing to reconnect with each other, learning to focus on family over work (a trope that was tired even in 2003, of course, but it's still something), and equally establishes the strange, eerie, supernatural environment they find themselves trapped in. The Gracey mansion is large and imposing, dark and covered in cobwebs and dust; it is at the same time both cavernous and claustrophobic, like the house is trying to smother the Evers family or digest them, in either case to never let them leave. There are piles of books and clutters of collected tchotchkes, half-melted candles and animal trophies everywhere. It feels like a house with a real history, a place that's truly been lived in. The 2023 mansion, on the other hand, is so obsessively focused on recreating scenes from the ride that it becomes embarrassing and, if you don't know the ride by heart already, frankly confusing. The actors are clearly struggling to act within the confines of what I assume are a lot of blue screen rooms; taking small steps and avoiding any arm gestures that might interfere with the work of the exploited CGI artists later down the pipeline; at one point poor LaKeith Stanfield does his best to pantomime wobbling so as not to fall into an incredibly fake mirror that then rushes away from him down a CGI hallway for no substantive reason. The film makes no effort whatsoever to portray its mansion as a real house with any history; it is purely a Branded Experience for Nostalgia Purposes, nothing more.

A perfect example of this dichotomy of Story vs. Brand can be seen when comparing a pivotal scene from each movie: in 2003, Jim Evers and his daughter Megan are trapped inside a mausoleum being pursued by a horde of (amazingly crafted, very scary) zombies, while his son Michael has to overcome his fear of spiders to unlock the door from the other side. They had a clear reason to go in there (to retrieve a key), they have a clear reason to get the hell out (zombies), and there's a clear ticking clock element and a moment of character growth (Michael overcoming his fear).

Hey, that almost sounds like it was written by someone who gives a shit!

In 2023, Stanfield's Ben Matthias and young kid Travis find themselves in the iconic Stretching Room from the ride; the ceiling begins to rise above them, while the floor turns into quicksand... and also barrels of TNT... and also a bottomless pit... and also there's an alligator. Wait, what? The editing is so quick and terrible that you barely have any time to register these things all popping up at once, the music is loud and the camera movements around the blue screen set are so bad that it all blends together into a cacophony of nonsense with the two characters climbing up the walls until one of the paintings tells them to grab onto the gargoyles like a fucking video game hint box. Now, since I've been on the ride, I know that all the nonsense happening to the floor is a jumbled reference to the iconic paintings in the Stretching Room, but since those paintings are never alluded to, directly referenced, or shown on screen even once before this scene, any audience member who isn't familiar with the ride won't know what the hell is going on. The characters have no story reason to be in that room at that time, there is no moment of character growth, and they're conveniently given a hint by a non-character rather than finding a solution to their problem on their own. To quote Emma Coats' 22 Pixar Storytelling Rules, "Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great, coincidences to get them out of it are cheating." A completely random painting that tells the protagonists exactly what to do so they don't have to think is cheating.

But why did I bring up the MCU in the beginning, you ask. Because, dear reader, Haunted Mansion has a supervillain, and ends with a supervillain magic battle where all the main characters come together like the fucking Avengers stepping out of sling-ring portals. Where the 2003 film took inspiration from the ride's characters like Mr. Gracey and the ghost bride and wrote a story that... y'know, makes sense while staying grounded to the confines of the mansion... the 2023 film needs a serial-murdering ghost supervillain who just needs one more soul so he can finish his Unspecified Super Evil Scheme, and we need a swarming screaming torrent of ghosts zooming around, and purple lightning, and green fog, and a supervillain speech, and it all needs to be drawn out for ten minutes of Ben and the Hatbox Ghost just standing in one spot. Do you remember how headache-inducingly loud and pointless the Ego boss battle in Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 is? It's that but tacked onto a shit movie instead of a great one.

The 2003 movie's ending has a god damn dragon made of fire grabbing Terrence Stamp to literally drag him down to Hell for eternity, and that fucking rules. It takes two minutes, short and sweet, get in and get out. No part of the 2003 movie overstays its welcome, whereas the 2023 movie is Cousin Eddie emptying his shit tank in front of your house, Clark.

There's a surprising yet obvious link between comedy and horror, from a filmmaking perspective. Constructing an effective scare is just like constructing an effective joke: You need an establishment/setup, a build-up, and a punchline. Yes, good scares have punchlines: the moment when the scare hits; the climax of that scary moment. If a director is really good at either comedy or horror, it's usually not impossible for them to make movies in the opposite genre as well; take Sam Raimi, for example. In a YouTube video that I unfortunately can't find or remember now (seriously, if you know which one it is tell me, I'd love to properly credit it!), the person talked about Sam Raimi's excellent sense of timing, specifically in Spider-Man's climactic battle with the Green Goblin: Norman Osborne is defeated, begging for his life, while his weaponized glider rises up behind Spider-Man, unbeknownst to our hero; that's the setup and the tension, the buildup - culminating in the glider shooting forward and Spider-Man's split-second dodge, sending the glider's blades right into Norman's gut: the punchline. The point of all of this is to say that I don't understand why a movie cut by an editor who has worked largely on comedies is sliced and diced at such a dizzying pace that at one point I told my friend "This feels like I'm having a panic attack". Every single joke and scare in Haunted Mansion is cut in a way that specifically fucks up both the setup and the punchline, every single time. It's hard to describe in writing, but not a single moment that should be funny or scary registers because they are either cut too soon, start too late, or are just filmed so badly that you don't even see it really. Again I blame this on the MCU; this video by Every Frame a Painting talks about Jackie Chan's style of directing action, but the part I've linked to specifically talks about American action editing, and more specifically citing Guardians of the Galaxy as an example of bad action editing. Now, I like the MCU a lot, and GOTG is my favorite trilogy within that universe, but yeah the editing is God-awful, there's no two ways around it. And yes, I'm talking about fight scenes now, but whether it's action, horror, or comedy, the same principles can be applied to all three genres when we're talking about these similar elements; specific punches/jokes/scares need to be set up and paid off, and 2023 Haunted Mansion isn't interested in any of that.

I haven't even talked about the characters yet because there's nothing to say. Tiffany Haddish is the best performance and the best character, and both are sorely wasted on this film. LaKeith Stanfield almost has an interesting character, but it's so flimsy he might as well be made of poster board. Jamie Lee Curtis is fucking asleep as Leota, I swear - bring back Jennifer Tilly. I also find it bizarre that the filmmakers decided to "honor" Imagineer Rolly Crump, who was one of the leading minds behind the Haunted Mansion, by naming the serial-killing supervillain ghost after him. Nice tribute /s.

I really can't recommend Haunted Mansion to anyone other than toddlers, because that's how I felt during the ridiculous two hour runtime - like a baby getting keys jingled in my face in the form of countless CGI ghosts swarming around. I've come to the conclusion that Disney must have a team of burly enforcers who stand off to the side of modern film shoots, like mafiosos supervising The Godfather, to make sure the directors they hire don't try anything too creative or interesting. It makes me feel kind of sad that a good director like Justin Simien can go from Dear White People, a thought-provoking, tightly written comedy (with the same editor, too!!) and get put through the Disney meat grinder to put out something so genuinely forgettable and cynical; to go from social commentary film to Branded Product. Everyone has bills to pay, of course, and who can turn down a Disney check? I certainly can't blame him for taking the job, just like I can't blame Edgar Wright or Chloe Zhao or Phil Lord and Chris Miller for having their signature filmmaking styles get chewed up and spit out by the Disney Machine, to create Marketable Products. Hopefully someday soon Disney will make movies again, but until then it's best to just let this stinker rot in a grave. There were certainly no grim grinning ghosts in my house when I finished watching this garbage.