Haunted Mansion director Justin Simien talks about the Disney ride movie, balancing horror with comedy, and his thoughts on its poor reviews.
Summary Disney is inviting audiences on a scarily fun ride as Haunted Mansion comes to home shelves. The movie acts as the second adaptation of the Disneyland ride of the same name, centering on a disillusioned astrophysicist as he's recruited alongside a group of paranormal experts to help a single mom and her son rid the eponymous house of the various ghosts residing inside.
Justin Simien: Yeah, I grew up on these things. I figured out I wanted to be a director watching these kinds of things, and when I say these kinds of things, I specifically mean Disney movies. I remember coming back from Beauty and the Beast, at like eight or nine, just blown away. I had just seen the most amazing thing, and I cannot draw at all, but I would sit at home, and I would try to redraw all of the scenes.
Justin Simien: It was exactly that, it felt like a combination of those two things. Reading the script, it honestly read like a Dear White People script. It was funny, it was an ensemble. I think all haunted house stories are really about somebody that is dealing with some aspect of themselves that they're having trouble integrating or accepting, and the role of everyone else in a haunted house movie is to sort of remind them of things of themselves that they really would rather forget.
Justin Simien: It's a bummer, to be honest. It's a bummer to feel like people don't get something that you're doing, and that you've worked so hard on, but ultimately, it's usually been the other way around. Especially with Dear White People coming out of Sundance, where critics loved Dear White People, and audiences eventually loved it. But at first, it was incredibly divisive, and it was incredibly polarizing.
One thing that I especially find interesting about this film is just the sheer ensemble that you have for this movie, it is a huge cast, even with its cameos. I was surprised some of them didn't get bigger roles.
Justin Simien: It was mostly voiceover work for that role. Some of that was kind of like Disney is a massive place, and you never quite know for sure where what you're doing fits into their franchise plans and the puzzle that they're building. But, with Jared, it was like, "It will be Jared Leto." And I was quite pleased that he was so comfortable being collaborative, letting us sort of figure out some of the physicality while he really worked on this.
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