Disney talking about existential dread? The new Haunted Mansion movie

Haunted Mansion Spoilers ⚠️

Disney’s new Haunted Mansion was a better experience than I ever would have thought. Buying the tickets to see the movie, I was ready for another silly movie like the first 2003 Haunted Mansion that focused on the Gracey story with the butler as the villain: The hatbox ghost was coming to be the main villain in this new movie. He is a dark and powerful ghost who was trying to collect souls in order to haunt earth.

The movie showed the reason Master Gracey ended up as a ghost there is because the hatbox ghost convinced him that he would be able to see his passed wife Elizabeth again, which was a lie because he actually needs to collect his soul for the villain to be released onto earth. This was touched in the 2003 movie where Master Gracey tried to steal the main character’s wife to be his own. He is shown to be the one always hanging on to his lost love.

There was the element of humor still in the movie as shown with the jokes in the trailer, but there is also the concept of getting through a hard time and wanting to stay living instead of following suit into death yourself. The existential dread of moving on in life when you want to stay put. This shows the element that the person who passed would want you to live and keep moving forward in life.

I enjoyed the mix of comedy and horrror with Danny DeVito riding a chair one moment and LaKeith Stanfield getting axed out of the attic by Constance Hatchaway when trying to find Madame Leota’s crystal ball. It was a nice touch how they added another medium besides Madame Leota to help find her as they come together to banish the hatbox ghost whose real name is Allistair Crump. To banish him, they had to find his hat in his old house. The dining room there showed how he wanted to be bigger than the other people around him, so he sawed off the legs on the other chairs in the dining room. He was the reason the ghosts of the house kept dying in such strange ways.

When the mansion started becoming too entangled with the ghosts in the other realm, the mansion started stretching, twisting, and turning. This was a nice ode to the ride with the stretching portraits. The main character named Ben gets to twist and turn through these hallways while the hatbox ghost tries to convince him that his passed wife doesn’t truly know that he loved her, so he wants him to give up his life and cross over. He helps the young boy who lost his dad through his grief, which in turn helps him to realize his wife did know he loved her.

When the hatbox ghost is finally banished at the end, the other ghosts could then go on to their afterlife, but they wanted to stay and play in the mansion. This keeps the lore of the ghosts in the mansion alive as the family decides to live there with them. The first movie in 2003 showed them all leaving the house, but I enjoyed better where they decided they should stay there because it goes with it’s slogan of always saying that there is “room for one more.” The playing ghosts have to stay around for the ride to stay alive and it makes me wonder if they will do a sequel where the hatbox ghost tries to find a way to come back again.