2/10 Disney’s Haunted Mansion, brought to you by Uhaul, Zillow, Amazon, CVS Pharmacy, Costco, Baskin Robbins, Burger King and many more, is the product of a business model at the end of its life cycle. It wants to be Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, but it can’t, because CGI drained the budget at the expense of things like sets, music and getting all of the actors together to perform their scenes. Comparing the two is absolutely ludicrous, because they were made under such fundamentally different production principles and sets of priorities that they register as completely separate categories of product.

New Orleans- Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) rolls up to a massive, clearly haunted former plantation, her entire life packed into a utility trailer, and the story writes itself – obviously, she inherited the mansion unexpectedly, maybe from a relative she has to learn about in the process of fixing the place up, it’s her only asset and she’s forced to flip it by herself, but in a shocking twist, the mansion is haunted. She has to call in several fun, kooky experts, and the real inheritance is the friends she makes along the way. The whole thing easily builds out into a metaphor for reconnecting with lost family and/or coming to terms with the U.S.’ horrific past manifested in the form of ghosts. 

That’s not what happens. Instead, Gabbie is a medical doctor who’s always dreamed of running a bed-and-breakfast. She has decided to move from New York City to New Orleans, buying this sprawling former plantation sight-unseen with the intent to fix it up by herself into this highly local, not-very-profitable business in a completely unfamiliar part of the country as her license to practice medicine presumably gathers dust. On top of all the problems she’s freely decided to subject herself to, in a shocking twist, the mansion is haunted. 

This is a mere taste of how weird, off-putting and wrong Haunted Mansion is – the fun, kooky experts all have similar word-salad backstories. The highlight is Ben Matthias (LaKeith Stanfield), an – I swear to Christ I’m not making this up – an astrophysicist-turned paranormal tour guide. He’s successfully invented a camera that can capture spirits, no one bought it, and now he’s leading ghost tours in the French Quarter and drinking himself to death because he hates the tourists so much.  

This is all conveyed over three separate introduction scenes, then opening credits that kind-of repeat one of those introductions, so the movie broadcasts right out of the gate that it’s a complete mess. The first 10 minutes or so seem like they were shot as flashbacks that were instead slapped onto the start of the movie where they fit chronologically, but absolutely don’t fit narratively, and it’s easy to believe that’s exactly what happened. 

Haunted Mansion might have worked with a broken timeline and a more consistent tone, but instead it’s a vaguely Disney-feeling romp full of bizarre tonal shifts. The movie will oscillate between fun theme-park ride jokes, heavy scenes about grief and then transition into somewhat disturbing ghost tales all played off for laughs seemingly without being aware of how wildly the vibes are shifting from scene to scene. For an easy example, Matthias goes from rocking in tears over his dead wife, who he’s starting to say he wants to join, in one scene, to the attic dodging the jilted bride’s ax as she swings exclusively at his neck before directing her last attempt at his testicles, just to make sure the subtext is all there. It seems like something a boardroom might collectively decide is approachable and family-friendly, but really makes for a bland, aimless movie. 

Once it starts to fill with people, Haunted Mansion has that stationary blocking problem you get when all these stars were obviously not on-set at the same time. In progressively larger dialogue scenes, every character gets one shot, always framed from the waist up, and the film calmly alternates between those shots until the dialogue is over, with no one ever moving around in the space. It’s a problem for everyone, but it’s especially painful to see with the team’s medium, Harriet (Tiffany Haddish). Haddish is great at exactly the type of animated, over-the-top performance that might have given Haunted Mansion some real character. She wants to move around and get into her performance, but it looks like she’s being repeatedly told not to. 

The hindered performances hurt more than they might because they’re all Haunted Mansion has to offer. Once we finally get to the house, the set design is great from what we can make out, but it’s lit terribly, so the foreground and background don’t look attached. There’s obviously some thought put into layout and overall composition, but the movie doesn’t really let you appreciate it.

It should go without saying at this point, but the CGI is horrible. In the continuing fallout of 1993’s Jurassic Park, which made rare use of computer animation but inspired the onslaught of half-cartoons this century that are built on it entirely, it isn’t enough to spare no expense – it has to look like no expense was spared, even if that means looking worse. In Haunted Mansion’s case, this means elaborate tendrils of ectoplasm coming from every ghost and crazy designs that you can’t really see for the lighting effects. These can’t just be regular ghosts, they must be $150 million worth of ghost, but ironically, because how efficiently the CGI-first, CGI-always method of filmmaking makes money vanish, everything else looks cut-rate. 

The lowlight comes early, in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment Matthias dusts off his spectral camera. His ghost-detection apparatus is a DSLR with some scifi-looking plastic attached to the lens and some kind of display attachment. That should be great, we love cheap sci-fi gizmos, but even in one brief shot, you can tell the whole thing is wrong. For some reason, they used a cheap plastic prop that can’t pass for camera. Not only did no one in this $150 million movie production have a $150 camera lying around to use in the shot, but also no one in control of this corporate product crassly stuffed to the brim with product placement thought to call Nikon or Canon for this. Instead, we get a closeup of this plastic thing and foley of Matthias screwing in a lens that doesn’t sound like a lens clicking into place and doesn’t even line up with the visual. 

It’s a complete massacre of what should be a very simple closeup, and I’m absolutely not the only person who’s going to notice these things. Personal photography is a major industry in this country, even at the hobby level. A large percentage of viewers, and a larger percentage of the people who made this movie, are going to be able to list out everything wrong with this shot. For all of Haunted Mansion’s larger-scale failures that speak to its production process and corporate motivation, it’s these details, that we can’t have a simple, less-than-a-second closeup of a prop camera without everything being horribly wrong, that show how low-effort the whole thing was. 

Photography and portraiture is, of course, hugely important within the movie and the theme park attraction – the first step of a person becoming a ghost is their image being captured. Most haunting scenes begin with the portraits of these long-dead people staring back at characters, then stirring in their frames out of sight. There’s a wonderful movie here about the power of imagery to recklessly preserve, to keep people alive well past their time and prevent them from resting in peace, and by extension the power of the idealized memory of grief to prevent either the dead or the living from moving on, but these themes remain dormant in Haunted Mansion. 

There’s also very strong anti-imperialist subtext, as Dear White People director Justin Simien packs a mostly black cast into a southern mansion that definitely used to be called “the big house,” and accompanying anti-capitalist themes of rising up against the boss are also apparent. 

It hurts seeing such a bare minimum execution of what seems like a strong collection of concepts. Someone, somewhere in the process of making Haunted Mansion had a good idea for it, maybe several good ideas for it, and you can still see them swirling around in there. 

There’s a lot of fixing up that needs to be done to make this Haunted Mansion sellable, but the two quickest routes to the largest improvements are the music and the horror elements. Haunted Mansion wants to be an adventure movie full of fun and danger, and it feels neither fun nor dangerous. The music that should rise with the stakes to help lift viewers out of our seats is instead all but muted playing in the background unconnected from the action, closer to elevator music than the score of a major motion picture. The ghosts that should frighten viewers and pose a serious threat to protagonists are instead cartoon goofballs, scary in principle but still friendly for the most fearful of children, and Gabbie seems to regard them as pests she needs help getting rid of more than as undead human beings, eternally trapped souls who are trying to trap her along with them. 

The precise movie Haunted Mansion needs and wants to be, the kid-friendly but still incredibly sexy adventure with the bombastic score and the hard horror elements, already exists – it’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl is 20 years old.

Haunted Mansion is what it looks like when a production company dies. Movies “adapted from” theme park rides aren’t popular anymore – they never were, it was really just one inspired breakout hit that had little to do with its source material – so when this dying wing of Disney productions takes one last run at one of their higher-profile properties, every possible aspect is monetized and every cost is minimized. This is the cinematic result of selling everything that isn’t nailed down. 

As always, excuses abound for the film’s catastrophic box office failure. Apparently, Disney totally had an enormous marketing push with all the actors all planned and ready to go, but it got stuffed by the SAG strike, and the twin release of Barbie and Oppenheimer the weekend before meant Haunted Mansion was opening against competition much stronger than anyone in the industry acknowledged. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence, a confluence of events the entire movie world knew about months in advance, but that Disney apparently couldn’t prepare for. 

But the films comprising “Barbenheimer” weren’t just extremely popular and paired with marketing departments capable of planning more than two weeks in advance. They invested in real sets. They featured intricate performances. They had soundscapes almost as engrossing as their visuals – Barbie has an entire soundtrack of songs written specifically for the film, and it’s still got a solid presence on the radio. The film that could be considered a feature-length toy advert in which Mattel’s CEO is a major character feels less corporate and gross than Haunted Mansion. 

They are films in all the ways Haunted Mansion is a product, and a shoddy one at that. 

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.