The Haunted Mansion is a family comedy that's begging to be picked apart, with an elaborate
mythology full of strange implications that child viewers just gloss over while the adults
in the room can't stop thinking about them. Here are a few things that only adults notice.
The setup for The Haunted Mansion requires the human characters to get to the titular
house as quickly as possible, and the way the Evers family ends up at Gracey Manor is,
as a result, quite simple. Jim and Sara Evers are realtors, one of their flyers ends up
at the manor, and the ghostly owner has his butler call them to arrange a meeting with
Sara, whom he believes is the reincarnation of his lost love.
"Mom?"
When the Evers family arrives at the house, spurred by Jim's workaholic tendencies, they
find the place looking like no one's visited in some time.
Over the course of the movie, it's revealed that the grounds of Gracey Manor feature an
elaborate necropolis, and the mansion itself is a massive monument on the landscape, so
how has it and its many ghostly residents gone unnoticed for so long? Jim makes his
family go to the mansion after Sara tells him the address, and he immediately knows
it's an affluent area; so if he knows that, why don't other people? Perhaps it's part
of the curse surrounding the manor, but it's hard to imagine that urban explorers or paranormal
snoopers hadn't scoped the place out already.
As the Evers family explores the titular haunted mansion, they come across a variety of ghosts.
It all begins with the butler, Ramsley, and then Edward Gracey, the ghostly owner of the
manor. But then things get more complicated. The film establishes that the further away
ghosts get from the main house, the more "dead" they are. That means the ghosts that live
in the cemetery have blue, ethereal forms, and when the ghosts in the house leave it,
they take on the same ethereal form.
That's a simple enough mechanic to understand ... except that there's also a ghostly horse
that's just a skeleton running around blasting through walls, and a group of barbershop quartet
ghosts that haunt statues, a fortune teller ghost in a crystal ball, and just flat-out
zombies in the tombs beneath the property, rotting flesh and all.
So, what's with all the different ghost forms? The obvious real-life answer is to make the
movie look cooler, but why do the above-ground ghosts get to have cool blue wispy forms while
the below-ground ones are just walking rotters who want to kill anything that moves?
Gracey Manor is haunted because of a curse visited on it years earlier. In the same way
that the characters in Beauty and the Beast are cursed to live as animated objects, the
characters of The Haunted Mansion are unable to cross over into the afterlife. Over the
course of the film, we learn that this curse happened because Ramsley sabotaged his master
Edward's marriage proposal to his servant, Elizabeth. Convinced that their union couldn't
happen, Ramsley killed Elizabeth and made it look like a suicide, causing Edward to
take his own life.
And as a result ... everyone on the grounds of the mansion is cursed, including the victims
of Ramsley's crime. Why do Edward and Elizabeth have to suffer because of what Ramsley did?
They didn't do anything wrong. Perhaps Edward's own deliberate suicide is what cursed the
place, but if that's the case, then why does everyone else have to stick around? There
are good guys and bad guys in The Haunted Mansion, but the curse is a raw deal for everyone.
"Are you telling me this guy is dead, and the only reason we were brought here is because
he wants to get jiggy with my wife?"
"Pretty much!"
The Haunted Mansion is a family horror-comedy with almost no outright horror elements. It's
based, as the title suggests, on a popular theme park attraction that exists at both
Disneyland and Walt Disney World.
And if you go off the plot of the movie, it's all founded on what's basically a hate crime.
"Okay, no, that's serious. That's serious."
Yes, the whole reason this mansion is haunted, in the continuity of the film, is because
a butler got angry that his white master was about to marry a mixed race servant, and decided
to poison her to prevent the marriage from happening. He's a racist who didn't think
their marriage would look right, and he just straight up murdered a woman because of it.
In a movie based on that ride at Disneyland where "Grim Grinnin' Ghosts" plays. You can
go to The Haunted Mansion at one of Disney's parks and ignore this fact, but once you've
seen The Haunted Mansion movie, it's hard not to think about it at least a little bit.
One of the key comedic hooks of The Haunted Mansion as a movie rests on the premise that
the Evers family does not know they're heading to a house full of ghosts. When they meet
the major players in Gracey Manor, they at first appear as normal (if a little strange)
human beings. One of the first things Ramsley the butler does when they arrive is serve
them an elaborate dinner. Later, when we meet Rita the maid, she serves the Evers children
a plate of fresh cookies.
It's well established throughout the film that these ghosts are able to handle physical
objects, so it's not surprising that they were able to do things like serve soup and
bake cookies, but ... who went to the grocery store for them? Did they have that stuff delivered
and just pay for it with old money lying around the mansion? Did they only make the food from
the stuff they grew out on the grounds? If they did, we didn't see it. Whatever the case,
those are some very resourceful ghosts.
The Haunted Mansion is a film in which a house full of people are cursed to an eternal ghostly
existence because the butler sabotaged the owner's marriage to his lover, but we don't
learn this right away. The film takes its time unfolding the mystery of exactly why
the place is cursed, and one particular mystery isn't solved until the very end.
"These walls are filled with so many memories some of them painful."
Edward Gracey killed himself when he found out his lover was dead, but we see him almost
immediately when the Evers family arrives at the mansion. He's cursed to be a ghost,
but he can move around and look normal. His lover, Elizabeth, is also hanging around the
house, but she exists as what the Evers kids call a "ghost ball," a wordless orb floating
around until she finally possesses the body of Sara Evers at the end of the film to tell
her side of the story. Elizabeth then explains that she couldn't be freed until the truth
of what happened to her was told, but what she doesn't explain is why.
Elizabeth did nothing wrong. She fell in love with a rich man and then that man's butler
killed her, and as a result she's punished for ... unwittingly drinking poison? Her glowing
prison only seems to exist to serve as a clever last-minute reveal.
We can pick apart the particulars of the curse at the heart of The Haunted Mansion all we
want, because in terms of who it affects, how it affects them, and why, it's a rather
flimsy concept. Despite that, though, one key role seems to apply across the board for
most of the movie: The ghosts are at the mansion because the curse is keeping them from moving
on into the afterlife. That's explained pretty early on, and when the film reaches its climax,
it seems to pay off. The curse is lifted when the spirits of Elizabeth and Edward are reunited,
and the ghosts all float up into heaven as bright orbs of light, signifying their final
passage from this world.
Except ... the ghosts don't all do that. The final scene of the film reveals that the Evers
family is still dealing with Leota, the fortune teller ghost, as well as the barbershop quartet
who exist as singing statues in the graveyard. What the film doesn't explain is why these
ghosts stuck around. Did they choose to because being spooky is fun? Did they get stuck in
the objects they possess? We don't know, but if they're stuck and need to be let out, that's
very unfair.
The human journey of The Haunted Mansion is that of the Evers family as they try to navigate
their personal issues namely Jim's workaholic tendencies and his son Michael's paralyzing
fear of spiders while also trying to help a cursed group of people find their way to
the light. In the end, after plenty of shenanigans, they succeed, breaking the curse of Gracey
Manor by revealing the truth about what happened to Elizabeth and allowing her to be with Edward
again, while also defeating the evil Ramsley. For their trouble, they are awarded the deed
to Gracey Manor in the form of a big, ribbon-tied scroll handed to them by Edward before he
departs for the afterlife.
It's a nice little moment in some ways. After all, it's the ultimate victory for a pair
of realtors to nab a mansion that they can do whatever they want with, but there's a
reason a lot of haunted house movies don't touch on this issue: it forces us to ask who
has owned the mansion since Edward died. Has the local government simply forgotten about
it, or has Edward forged paperwork to make himself look like his own great-grandson so
he can keep the property taxes current? And for that matter, who installed things like
the phone line? It all unravels if you think about it from a homeowner's perspective.
Most of the fantasy stuff in The Haunted Mansion, as the title suggests, revolves around ghosts.
A decades-old curse fell on the house after a tragedy; the ghosts can't leave while the
curse is in place. Hauntings are not the only supernatural happenings at Gracey Manor, though.
There's also a very prominent element of magic in certain plot points. Madame Leota, the
fortune teller trapped in a crystal ball, is apparently still very good at prophecy,
and Ramsley the evil butler reveals that he has certain magical tricks up his sleeves,
including an ability to magically lock Jim out of the house. Then, at the end, Ramsley
tries to summon some evil ghosts to fight Edward, only to be defeated when a full-blown
dragon made of fire jumps out of the fireplace and drags him down to Hell.
Even setting aside the idea that the film seems to be explicitly evoking Hell as a place
of fire and punishment, where did the dragon come from? Was he hanging out the whole time?
Who summoned him? Were forces in another realm just watching all of this drama unfold, waiting
for their moment? Clearly there are bigger things happening in this movie's haunted world
than what we're seeing onscreen.
“Please don't drop me. I'm fragile. I'm very fragile."
"Don't talk to me about being fragile. I'm the one who's feeling fragile right now."
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