Stubs - Haunted Mansion (2023)

Haunted Mansion (2023) starring LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jared Leto Directed by Justin Simien. Screenplay by Katie Dippold. Based on The Haunted Mansion by Walt Disney. Produced by Dan Lin, Jonathan Eirich Run time: 123 minutes. USA. Color. Supernatural Horror, Comedy.

Sometimes a film can have a really great cast but the material doesn’t live up to the casting. Such is the case with Haunted Mansion, a 2023 release from Walt Disney. It's a remake of sorts of The Haunted Mansion (2003), the original, which only gets better when compared with this film.

Originally announced in 2010, Guillermo del Toro was set to write and produce, but thirteen years later, del Toro was nowhere to be found. Not sure what that version would have looked like, but you put it down to we’re never going to know. Through the years, other actors were attached, including Ryan Gosling, but were long gone by the time the film went into production in 2021.

The film, like the original, and the ride both are passed on, is set in New Orleans. At a New Year’s Eve gathering at a local tavern, Ben Matthias (LaKeith Stanfield) meets Alyssa (Charity Jordan), a tour guide for the city's famously haunted places. While most of their relationship is told in flashbacks, the two fall in love, get married and Ben even develops a camera lens that can capture apparitions.

Alyssa (Charity Jordan)

Meanwhile, widowed doctor Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) move into the abandoned Gracey Manor. Travis doesn’t want to be there, but Gabbie is planning to turn the mansion into a bed and breakfast. She tries to sooth Travis:

Gabbie: I know this place isn't as warm as I hoped. But I'm gonna light a vanilla candle, and it's gonna be a game-changer.

They quickly discover that the mansion is infested with ghosts, e.g. haunted.

Gabbie: [sees ghosts] Yeah, we gone.

They leave at once, but a spirit voice tells them that they’ll be back.

Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon).

Since we last saw him, Ben has become a tour guide, though it’s obvious that his heart isn’t in it. He takes tours to haunted places but is adamant that there is no such thing as ghosts. He’d rather day drink and sleep in. Alyssa, we later learn, has been killed in a car crash, which, of course, Ben blames on himself.

His downward spiral of self-loathing is broken up when Father Kent (Owen Wilson) knocks on his door and enters Ben’s home with an urgent request, “Do you want to be a hero?” Ben is only convinced when there is money involved and he agrees to visit Gracey Manner and check it out for ghosts. When Ben arrives, he realizes that his camera battery is drained, so he pretends to take photos and then concludes there are no ghosts in the mansion.

However, he finds out that the ghost of a mariner has followed him and washes him out of his house. He heads back to Gracey Manor, where he finds Father Kent is living there, too, having been forced back by a spirit the way Ben has been.

Gabbie, Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), Ben Matthias (LaKeith Stanfield),and Father Kent (Owen Wilson).

They recruit psychic Harriet (Tiffany Haddish), who works birthday parties, but she turns out to have real psychic powers. However, they need more information. They find a college historian and professor at Tulane University, Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito), who studies mansions in and around New Orleans, and while he’s interested, they are trying to save him from getting trapped and manage to steal his research on Gracey Manor, which includes the blueprints.

Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito) brings a certain expertise.

Back at the house, the group uses the blueprints to locate a secret séance room, where Harriett manages to contact the spirit of William Gracey (J. R. Adduci) the first owner of the house. He writes a message instructing them to talk to legendary medium Madame Leota. A malevolent entity forces Harriet out of the house. When Bruce arrives, he is also forced out.

Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis) in her full regalia as a medium for Gracey.

The group stays at the mansion, however, and searches for Leota. In the attic, Ben runs afoul of ghostly bride Constance Hatchaway (Lindsay Lamb) and finds a locked trunk containing a crystal ball holding Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis) herself. She discloses that Gracey recruited her to contact the spirit of his late wife every night for an entire year, resulting in the mansion's ghosts taking up residence.

A malevolent spirit later tricked Gracey into committing suicide and trapped Leota inside her crystal ball; having acquired 999 souls throughout the years, the spirit needs one more in order to escape from the mansion.

Ben meets Gracey's ghost (J. R. Adduci) when he accidentally astral projects.

Back in the séance room, Harriet attempts to perform an astral projection on herself, but Ben is the one affected and is sent out of his body instead. It is in that state that he encounters Gracey's ghost and the malevolent spirit, Alistair Crump (Jared Leto), also known as the Hatbox Ghost, as his head disappears and reappears within a hat box he carries.

Going to a police station, they have a police sketch artist (Hasan Minhaj) draw the ghost as they described and then putting skin on the sketch, allowing the group to identify him as Alistair Crump, a wealthy heir who was shunned by his father and high society; after his father's mysterious death, a vengeful Crump lured his fellow socialites to their deaths while developing an obsession with the occult, until he was assassinated by his much-abused staff.

Crump seals the mansion but Ben, Kent and Travis escape to the Crump family home, where they badger the tour guide (Winona Ryder) looking for something owned by Crump; almost everything is a reproduction. The mariner, though, leads them to Crump's stovepipe hat to use in a banishment ritual.

Returning to Gracey Manor, Kent confesses that he is actually a con man. He worked at a costume shop and put on the preacher’s garb to make money off of residents who wanted ghosts exorcised from their homes, which is how he met Gabbie. They leave Travis in the car for his protection.

He and Ben soon rescue their friends, but Crump manages to take the hat and throws it into a fireplace, incinerating it. Crump has been impersonating Travis' late father and plots to make him his final soul. However, before Travis can be drawn in, Ben convinces him not to give in to his grief and they and Gabbie confront Crump in the mansion's graveyard.

Meanwhile, Kent manages to rally the ghosts to rebel against Crump, while, at the same time, Harriet frees Leota. Bruce recovers the remnants of the hat to carry out the banishment ritual.

In a final standoff, Crump tempts Ben to become his final soul and be reunited with Alyssa, and save the others. But Ben makes his peace with having lost Alyssa, giving Harriet and Leota enough time to send Crump back to the netherworld upon the ritual's completion.

Ben continues to move on with his life, even donating some of Alyssa’s things. Also, the cat staying by his door is named Tater Tot, a nod to his wife's love for the food.

On Halloween night, the group reunites at the mansion and catch up with each other. Ben has returned to teaching, Harriet has regained confidence in her psychic abilities, Kent has been ordained, Travis is elected class vice president, Gabbie has been hired at the local hospital, Bruce maintains his newfound friendships and many of the ghosts have chosen to stay at the mansion, now in harmony with the living residents.

The film ends with a hint that Gabbie and Travis might be heading to romance, though it never really states that. She warns him again that stepping foot in the house might change his life, similar to the warning she gave him when he first arrived, and Kent had conveniently been ordained, but that’s all. I know it sounds cliché, but audiences were probably hoping that the two lost souls would have found each other after the ordeal they had been to together.

And that sort of sums up the film, which seems to miss the mark. I don’t blame the cast, since there are some really good actors involved, including LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson and Jamie Lee Curtis. The only one I don’t think was cast right was Jared Leto, who was the motion capture performer for Crump. That seems like an odd job even for Leto to take.

This is definitely a case when you wonder why the studio decided to remake a film. The Haunted Mansion is not great cinema, but it told a story that was well-written and well-acted. This one doesn’t really feel necessary. It doesn’t get scarier, and it isn’t really funnier than the original. Disney is a studio known for their cash grabs, and perhaps it was the product placements that the film was made to highlight.

CVS, Zillow and Burger King are only some of the companies that get named outright or whose products get highlighted in the film. One critic in particular, Aleena Malik, wrote for Screen Rant that "movies tend to find organic ways to integrate product placement into the story and limit how many they include, but Haunted Mansion did the opposite. The call-outs to different products and brands felt excessive and completely out of place.”

Critics didn’t seem to take to the film, and the aggregate review on Rotten Tomatoes is a 5.1 out of 10.

Neither was the film a winner at the box office, making only $117.5 million on a budget of $150 million. Some of that you can put down to the time of it’s release. The summer of 2023 belonged to Barbie and Oppenheimer and perhaps the Halloween vibe wasn’t what audiences were looking for during the hot summer months.

And it’s probably not a film that you’d be looking for at Halloween. The film is not scary enough or funny enough to seek out, let alone watch.