Tuesday 31 October 2023

Haunted Mansion (2023)

31 Days Of Horror 13

Disney’s Haunted Mansion (2023)


Twenty years after the 2003 film with Eddie Murphy a few months after Pirates Of The Caribbean working (for the first film anyway) and two years after the Muppets took it on (and thirteen years after Guillermo Del Toro added it to his list of unmade films) we have another shot at Haunted Mansion for Disney’s 100th anniversary. Released in cinemas this summer it arrived on Disney+ in time to be a big part of its Halloween collection.

A mother (Rosario Dawson) and son (Chase W. Dillon) move into an incredibly creepy looking old house and see a ghost pretty much right away, and with no number for Ghostbusters they call an exorcist (Owen Wilson, and there may be a callback to the 1999 version of The Haunting as a result) recruiting a ragtag group of experts and seers (Danny DeVito, Tiffany Haddish, and LaKeith Stanfield as our reluctant hero) who find that the house has ghosts in triple figures.

It has some emotional weight, about grief and what you can do about it.

That many ghosts with backstories in place would be a great setup for a series, wouldn’t it? Ghosts got years out of just a handful. See also The Gatekeeper Trilogy of Buffy books and, again, Friday The 13th: The Series.

In the meantime this is a fair Hocus Pocus kind of Thir13en Ghosts thing with some nice gags as well as some pathos, while being an odd fit for the Addams-y vibe of the Haunted Mansion in itself.

Content note for suicide, which seems a bit off too. And product placement.

Gameability: Sorta competent ghost hunters? Yes.

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