When my nieces were a few years younger than they are now, we took them to the Magic Kingdom for the first time.  By “we,” I mean I went with my sister’s family to the theme park.  They were pretty little at that time, but for much of our wanderings around the confines, they insisted that they wanted to go on the Haunted Mansion ride.  So, we got our Fast Pass (back when Disney still had this system in place) and got in (the shorter) line.  As soon as we entered the front area where the attraction begins, they began crying.  To their credit, though, they toughed it out and got through it.  I always chuckle when I think back to how the tears instantly began to flow after they crossed that threshold, which is apropos of today’s movie.  Now that they are older, they are more interested in spooky things, and decidedly less scared.  Indeed, my oldest niece texted me a few days ago asking to see with me the new film version of this Disney classic, aptly called Haunted Mansion.  Unfortunately for her, I am currently in Chicago and she is not, but I will take her to see it when I return.  I am not pining to rewatch it, but I will do so for her.

Ironically enough, my niece is visiting New Orleans with her family, the city in which Haunted Mansion is set.  A narrator describes it as a “most paranormal place.”  Our main character, Ben (LaKeith Stanfield), seems perfectly normal, though, when we first meet him.  Of course, this is relative, since your average person is not an astrophysicist like him.  Anyway, he meets his future wife, Alyssa (Charity Jordan), while out on the town with friends.  We then cut to sometime in the future and something is not right.  He later reveals that she died in a car accident, but in the moment he is not taking it well.  He has quit his lucrative job and is working as an annoyed tour guide, carrying on his late wife’s work.  Meanwhile, a bit north of town, Gabbie (Rosario Dawson) and her oddly dressed son Travis (Chase W. Dillon), are moving into the title home.  I say “oddly dressed,” by the way, because the kid looks like he belongs in the 1920s.  Hey, it is cool with me, but he apparently gets bullied for it.  At any rate, they find out rather quickly that the large building is full of ghosts.  I will give the film credit here for the film subverting expectations because they leave immediately.  Most of the time, people try to stick around in this type of movie.  Unfortunately, the spirits of those that inhabit the place do not like those who visit to leave, following you wherever you go until you return.  In an attempt to try and figure out how to break this apparent curse, Gabbie turns to Father Kent (Owen Wilson).  Because it is later revealed that (shocker) he is a fraud and not actually a priest, I will refer to him as just Kent.  He tells people that he does exorcisms, which is problematic (more later), but he makes one visit to the mansion and knows that he needs help.  He thus turns to Ben, who had developed a lens for taking pictures of ghosts before Alyssa’s passing.  Initially, Ben wants nothing to do with this situation, it seeming too close to what Alyssa liked to do.  It is the promise of $2,000 that brings him to Gabbie’s home.  She warns him ahead of time not to come in, but he dismisses it because he does not believe in ghosts.  He pretends to snap a few photographs and leaves unconvinced that there is anything out of the ordinary happening.  Remember the part about the ghouls that hang around you?  It is Ben’s encounter that brings him back to the house, and there he must stay while they try to work out a way of breaking this spell.  They also recruit a few others along the way, like the medium Harriet (Tiffany Haddish) and Professor Bruce Davis (Danny DeVito), a historian.  Each of them end up coming to the mansion, and find that they must remain there or face hauntings wherever they go.  Still, each have a role to play in solving the mystery.  It starts with them discovering the identities of the original owners of the spread, married couple Eleanor (Erika Coleman) and William Gracey (J.R. Adduci).  They loved each other a great deal, and a heartbroken William used another psychic, Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis), to perform seances to contact Eleanor’s spirit after she died.  It continually proved unsuccessful, but invited a small army of other souls to inhabit the mansion.  None of these is fouler, as our team (if you will) discovers, as that of the Hatbox Ghost (voiced by Jared Leto).  I am a little unclear as to this villain’s overarching goal, but he needs 1,000 souls to complete some kind of whatever to be able to break free of the mansion, or something.  All you really need to know is that he was bad while he was living, and bad while dead.  Ben, Kent, and Travis discover this when they travel to the Hatbox Ghost’s former house, now a museum, looking for something that belonged to the monster during his mortal life.  Harriet needs it to perform a banishment incantation, which they believe will rid the house of the unwanted ghost.  Travis finds the ghost’s trademark top hat underneath the house, along with the graves of all his murder victims.  They bring back the item, but face a difficult battle as there is a full moon and Hatbox Ghost is at his strongest.  He is also luring Travis to be the 1,000^th victim, which must be willing in order for the villain’s plan to work.  Travis is being tempted by a promise to see his deceased father one more time.  It takes everyone working together one more time for Harriet’s spell to work, with a little assistance from Madame Leota, to get rid of Hatbox Ghost.  We then move ahead to Halloween and the newfound friends gather at the mansion to party amongst themselves and the now friendly ghosts that have taken up residence.

Haunted Mansion gets a little convoluted at times, though the emotional center is Ben.  I will discuss this in a little more detail in the next paragraph.  For now, I would point to how his arc is complicated by what happens with Travis at the end.  The film sets it up as a bonding experience between Ben and Travis, which kind of works.  It also makes for a more complicated, and longer, story.  In the end, Travis is convinced by Ben to pull back from being tricked into seeing his dad.  However, Ben must be persuaded in the same exact manner roughly fifteen minutes later.  From the beginning, it is being set up that Ben will have to face the temptation of wanting to communicate with Alyssa once more.  Hatbox Ghost offers the same deal with which he is luring Travis.  The point I am trying to make here is that expecting the audience to attach an equal amount of emotion to both moments, especially with them being so close in time to one another, is asking too much.  You have to let these moments settle in people’s hearts and minds before carrying on with the story, or at least that is my preference.

My further preference would be that Haunted Mansion not have been made in the first place.  Look, I enjoy the Disney ride as much as anyone.  It is mostly innocent.  The same cannot be said for the film.  What I worry about is the target audience.  I can handle a film like this a little more than the young people, like my nieces, who will watch this flick.  It is not too cliché to say that the young are impressionable.  I am speaking to the seances, primarily.  You want to know how I knew Kent was not actually a priest?  Because he is on board with attempting to communicate with the dead.  It is bad enough that he is cavalier in talking about performing exorcisms.  Those are truly no joke, and they should be treated with the gravity they deserve.  This is how the Church views them, to be sure.  As for seances, the Church does not approve of such activities because they are, in fact, dangerous.  You can say that the movie is all fun and games, yet the characters are portrayed as being scared for their lives.  I am not sure how that is ever enjoyable.  Nonetheless, there is a deeper spiritual matter at play.  The Church does not condone these practices because they are a threat to our salvation.  They can open the door to something far worse than what is intended, namely demons.  While God is more powerful, it is not easy to pull one back who has dabbled in these other worldly affairs.  You can see the trick, too, with what Hatbox Ghost offers Ben and Travis.  Grief leads people to actions they would not normally take, and again the film bears this fact out.  It is understandable, but wrong.  It is best to save yourself at least some trouble and just stick with God.

Thus, when the day comes that I take my niece to see Haunted Mansion, I will have a talk with her about such forces going into this movie.  Afterwards, it will be about the lessons to be gleaned, namely about letting go.  The film, at least, does do a decent job of addressing these issues.  I just do not care for its ignorant treatment of the spirit world.  Take this as a word of caution, foolish mortal.