In this episode we talked about The Haunted Mansion (2003), directed by Rob Minkoff, Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021) directed by Kirk Thatcher and Haunted Mansion (2023) directed by Justin Simien.

We were delighted to be joined by guest Ailish Brassil, and you can find her on twitter at @ailishbrassil.

Here is a link to the video showing the Haunted Mansion game that Adam mentioned in this episode.

Our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com and we're on instagram @stillscaredpodcast and twitter @stillscaredpod! Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and for our halloween and sixth anniversary episode we’re joined by special guest Ailish Brassil to talk about three different adaptations of The Haunted Mansion. Enjoy!

Ren: Good morning! And welcome to our episode on the Haunted Mansions plural, an exciting new format for this episode in which myself, Adam and our guest are each going to discuss a different adaptation of the Disney Haunted Mansion ride!

So I’ll introduce our guest: Ailish Brassil who is going into her second year of a PhD in English literature which focuses on horror at home in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Stephen King’s Carrie, Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Which is all very relevant to us here! Welcome Ailish!

Ailish: Hi Ren, Hi Adam thank you for having me. I’m very excited to be on this podcast especially with the topic of the Haunted Mansion. I suppose what fascinates me with this area of research is that children’s literature and films traditionally feature an adventure to another place followed by a safe return home, that being the main goal. Whereas what fascinates me is when the danger lurks inside the home, which is true of the four texts that i’m looking at in my Phd.

Adam: Yeah, that is really interesting. I guess a lot of the children’s horror texts we’ve looked at have figures of authority that are threatening but often they’re outside the home. So it might be headmasters or sinister priests, and sometimes it might be the parents, but often it’s an element that has come into the home. If you think of Grinny for instance: Grinny the alien grandma has entered into a normal suburban home. Whereas that’s not quite the case in the texts you’re looking at - in Coraline we have the sense that the other home within the home was always there, or at least has been there for a very long time.

Ailish: Yes, exactly.

Ren: Matilda’s an interesting inclusion there because I wouldn’t necessarily think of it as being focused on the home, because of the Trunchable —

Ailish: Yes, they all have similarities but there’s a few differences. With Coraline we’re looking at the other parents and with Carrie it’s her mother, but with Matilda we’re looking at the parents and also the school setting, so it’s nice that that one has a slight difference. And that relates to Rebecca because it’s the authority of the house keeper that really creates the horror for the narrator in that text.

Adam: And Carrie and Rebecca are really interesting choices, thinking from the perspective of children’s horror because while they are adult horrors, they do appeal potentially to children. Rebecca was my partner Antonia’s favourite film as a child as well as Brief encounter.

And Carrie, My first exposure to Carrie as a book was a kid called Rick reading it on a year six trip to France, I remember him up in the bunkbed reading Carrie. And I do think Carrie feels - I only read it a couple of years ago - but I feel like it feels like a children’s horror with some really lurid elements in there.

I think when I watched the film I thought all the squicky parts where Brian De Palma: “That De Palma what’s he like” whereas King has a reputation for being wholesome on some level, but then I read the book and I was like ‘oh alright’ because the squicky parts do come from Stephen King.

Ren: And the Haunted Mansion, Ailish was your suggestion, what’s your connection with the film or the ride?

Ailish: I suppose with the 2003 film I liked the idea of the house being the place of horror, but I liked the idea that the children went into the house with their parents which I thought was kind of interesting in a way. Like the horror might be toned down slightly because they have the security of their parental figures there with them, but throughout the film the viewpoints switched between kids exploring the mansion and their dad Jim exploring another part of it, and the adult’s fears and children’s fears are addressed in a way that by the end of the film it has changed their family dynamic for the better.

Ren: Yeah!

Adam: Is it a film you watched a s kid yourself?

Ailish Yes!

Adam Did you like it?

Ailish: I did! I always said that I wouldn’t watch horror films because they were too scary, but when I started my research I realised that I loved to read horror and then I would watch the film version and realise that I did like it. I really did enjoy the haunted mansion and even now when I rewatched it I forgot how much I liked it.

Ren: I’ve never see the 2003 film, although about the time that came out I did go on the ride in Disneyland Tokyo, weirdly.

Adam Oh, I didn’t know that!

Ren Yeah, I had this school Japanese exchange trip and one of the trips they took us on was to Disneyland, so so that is where I have experienced that icon of American culture.

Adam: I don’t know, I always say that early anime and manga there’s a big Disney influence, in Astro Boy particularly the way Tezuka does animals, with the big eyes really modelling the cute rabbits on Disney, there’s a lot of interchange really.

Ren: I was trying to think of what I remembered from going on this ride almost twenty years ago and I remembered the initial room that stretches, with the guide, it’s a room that’s an elevator.

And I remember the ballroom, one of the set pieces is the haunted ballroom and the ghosts are dancing and they had these 3D-looking projections that were really amazing to me at that time.

And to be fair that is more memories than any other ride from that trip so it was the most memorable, but I did watch a recent YouTube ride-through of the 2023 version to refresh my memory. But essentially The Haunted Mansion is a dark ride that launched quite early at the original Disneyland in 1969 and then went on to Orlando one and then Tokyo in the 80s so it’s quite an institution of Disneylands.

Adam: I only went to Paris as a kid and I don’t think it was there, but I would have been way too scaredy anyway.

Ailish: I’ve been to the one in Paris and I have to say it’s one of my favourite attractions. Where it’s located in Disneyland it’s just of New Orleans square which I think is really cool —

Adam: Ah! Okay so I just watched the recently released film version the 2023 version and that is set in New Orleans is that the case for your one too?

Ailish: Yes.

Ren: Um.

Adam: Is that the case for the muppets? Is that set in New Orleans?

Ren: I don’t know, the Muppets is set in Muppets. but one of the ghosts does have a Southern accent so maybe?

Adam: So we’d better explain. We’ve watched three different adaptations. So I guess in a bid to spearhead a new franchise like Pirates of the Caribbean Disney have attempted three times to start a successful Haunted Mansion franchise of films and we have individually watched one of these three different versions.

So Ailish do you want to start by explaining the version that you know and you’ve seen, who it starts and the basic plot of it?

Ailish: The Haunted Mansion is a 2003 film directed by Rob Minkoff and the opening sequence takes the audience back in time to a glamorous masquerade party happening at Gracey Manor which is the main setting. The house is alive, the colours are vibrant, the costumes extraordinary, but then tragedy strikes. Mr Gracey’s bride-to-be has seemed to have written a suicide note and poisoned herself, and when he finds her dead his devastation leads to his own suicide. So this house clearly has a past that is going to haunt the present.

Then the film reverts to the present day and the Evers family, with Jim and Sarah and their kids who own a real estate agency called Evers and Evers. They’re meant to be going on an adventure but get a last minute phone call to go to Gracey Manor. Though even that part is creepy because Sarah is called and told to come alone. The owner wants to sell the house because he wants to move on, on to the other side that is, because he’s dead.

The family gets stuck at the manor because of a raging storm that floods the river. I always love the terrible weather conditions that come with a scary house because the weather enhances the horror that’s to come.

The adventure that unfolds is more than any of them bargained for, the servants are all ghosts because the master couldn’t move on as he was waiting for his true love and the servants couldn’t move on because they were continuing to serve the hose and the master. In particular the butler Ramsley is the main antagonist, his cheeks are gaunt and he’s very pale even for a ghost. Jim, the dad character played by Eddie Murphy tells him to get rid of the ashy white look by getting a tan.

Ramsley floats around the mansion and appears unexpectedly everywhere, with the plot twist that Ramsley forged Elizabeth’s suicide note and poisoned her, hiding her original note accepting Edward’s proposal.

So the main adventure of the film is that the kids and parents have to find the note and break the devil’s curse so that the ghosts can ascend and leave, and Ramsley ends up in what I assume is the pits of hell as the fire dragon comes out of the fireplace and takes him away.

Adam: Yes that’s interestng, Ramsley or the Hat Box Man in the version of the Haunted Mansion that I’ve just seen by Justin Simien 2023, disappointedly played by Jared Leto, who really shouldn’t be let anywhere near a children’s film, is also dragged down to the depths of hell at the end and also has gaunt cheekbones.

Ren: I think you might have drawn the short straw of the Haunted Mansion adaptations, Adam.

Adam: Well yeah, it’s surprisingly moribund this film, it shouldn’t be as bad as it is, because it’s directed by Justin Simien who directed Dear White People which I saw when it came out and enjoyed quite a bit, it was pretty funny.

It’s got a pretty decent cast, main protagonist is Gabby, played by Rosario Dawson, who’s winningly charismatic, her son Travis is pretty adorable played by Chase Dillon and then she’s accompanied by this motley crew of Ben, who is a scientist and his research is described in the kind of spurious way you would expect in a Disney film. He does research into dark matter and quantum entanglement or something like that, which means he actually researches ghosts but he doesn’t want to call them ghosts because he’s a scientist. The whole film has this dubious compatibility of science and faith, like aren’t they just two sides of the same coin realllly? It does feel like it’s trying to appeal to a religious American audience that belives in ghosts, there’s an earnestness to it but it sometimes makes for some clunky - “dark matter and ghosts, they’re the same thing!”.

There is a priest played by spacey Owen Wilson, and Harriet played by Tiffany Hadish who is a medium and Danny DeVito playing a sort of university lecturer gone to seed character called Bruce Davis, and these various experts are assembled by Rosario to banish the spirits because the ghosts, particularly the Hat Box Man are making it very hard to settle in. It’s quite similar to the Ghostbusters reboot but not as good, I’d say, which makes sense as it was scripted by the same person.

It exists in a state of near-constant montage? It really feels like this film has been script-doctored to death, like it feels like there were a lots of beats from the Eddie Murphy film and the theme park ride that the screenwriters were told they had to include so it’s all exposition montage pretty much, I’ve rarely seen a film with such bad flow.

It’s a pretty winning cast, there are talented people and not a bad director either but it really has no sense of rhythm in terms of the edit, it’s just a bunch of exposition and set pieces stuck together. So it doesn’t really manage to create any creepy atmosphere or ambience at all, quite remarkably so, considering it’s all set in a creepy mansion. There’s no point where it settles down to create creepiness. But what does sound the same are the set pieces and the ghosts themselves, we have the ballroom with the dancers, we have the Hat Box Man and some of the special effects like the endlessly stretching corridor, so we’ll go through that. and Ren, you opted for the Muppets version

Ren: Yes, I had the pleasure of watching Muppets Haunted Mansion from 2021, we seem to be in an era of Haunted Mansion adaptations —

Adam The new era!

Ren The new era. almost 20 years without one and then two come along at once. which is currently on Disney +, it’s only 50 minutes, it’s a kind of halloween special, as this episode might be — happy halloween if in fact this is out on Halloween! — In the muppets version it’s Halloween and the rest of the muppets are having a party, Kermit and Miss Piggy are dressed as each other., it's very cute. They’re on a video call to Gonzo who is’s going on a fear challenge with Pepe the king prawn, this is the hundredth anniversary of a magician called the Great Macguffin’s disappearance, and the challenge is to survive the night in a haunted house.

Maki was upset that Gonzo was paired with Pepe rather than Rizzo the Rat, which is the more traditional combination.

Adam: The classic pairing from The Muppets Christmas Carol, which is almost a children’s horror film, certainly the ghost of Christmas yet to come scared me as a kid.

Ren: In this one he had Pepe in the sidekick role. But before they even get into the house they have this ghost introduction with a song and Gonzo is very gung-ho about this whole endeavour and says he isn’t scared of anything.

Will Arnett is the ghost host in this one, wearing a fetching floral waistcoat and he explains that they have to survive a night in the haunted mansion or they’ll stay there forever.

And then they just kind of roam around the Haunted Mansion? The plot points are that Gonzo has to admit that he’s scared of something because he says that he’s the Great Gonzo and he’s not scared of anything, but when he’s in Room 999 he’s faced with the fact that he’s actually scared of not seeing his friends again.

Pepe’s challenge is — we’ve established that he’s quite a thirsty prawn — and he becomes enchanted by a beautiful southern lady played by Taraji P Henson who is chewing the scenery enjoyably and she’s a female Blackbeard type, trying to add Pepe to her collection of doomed lovers.

Gonzo escapes his own challenge and he has to save Pepe and they race out before the sun rises. Then Will Arnett turns up and says they’re free to go but then it’s revealed that he is fact the Great Macguffin and he has a french fish in the pocket, which I just found very amusing.

It’s called Peewee the red herring and it says Au Revoir in its little squeaky voice which I enjoyed. And it ends with a cover of Dancing in the Moonlight, which I never realised was not originally by Toploader!

Adam: I’ve heard as much. For shame Toploader, you tricked us all!

Ren: If you’re a millennial you can’t not think of Toploader. But that’s Muppets Haunted Mansion and it was quite good fun, I enjoyed it.

Adam: Yeah, awesome! I’m generally pro Muppet adaptations of anything, to be honest. I can’t remember if we played this game before, where you have to think what the Best Muppet adaptations would be? I stick by the idea that The Wicker Man would be the best Muppet film.

Ren: Oh my God! Yes.

Adam: I don’t know whether you’d have a stern Sam the Eagle as Lord Summerisle or if it would be Kermit. I feel it should probably be Kermit.

Ren: I want to live in this universe.

Adam: I guess AI will make it, I just live under the assumption that in 10 years time we’ll live in a weird dystopia where we can say, “Alexa give me the Muppets version of the Wicker Man,” and it will just generate it.

Ren: And it will give you a cameo in it.

Adam: Yes, you could watch yourself burn in the wicker man and share the image to your social media.

Ren: So we have this bouquet of Haunted Mansions, so I guess it makes sense to talk about the points of similarity between them, because they’re all presumably hitting the same beats of the theme park ride to a certain extent.

Adam: Yes, although maybe in different orders because you said in the theme park ride itself the ever expanding corridor is right at the start?

Ren: Where you’re first herded into, your introduction to the ride, which was very much the case in the Muppets, they come into the house and Will Arnett is there, he pretty much says verbatim what the host in the ride says to the muppets.

Adam: Because he’s playing a magician I just keep thinking of him a Gob from Arrested Development, saying ‘I’m not a magician, I’m an illusionist!’

Ren: He’s kind of been overtaken over as Bojack Horseman in my head because I’ve watched so much Bojack.

Adam: So where does the corridor appear in the Eddie Murphy vehicle, Ailish?

Ailish: So, the butler Ramsley tries to get Jim offsite because Jim’s wife looks exactly like the master’s wife that died many years ago and they think it’s her that has come back.

So he tells Jim to go to the library because the master wants a word with him, he thinks he’s landed the sale of the house and he’s poking around the library and opens a secret passageway and gets trapped. And it’s the corridor that keeps extending and he’s stuck in there while the master Edward Gracey is trying to woo Sarah, Jim’s wife.

Adam: I quite like the idea of it being used as trap to buy time. In the Justin Simien one it’s shown quite near the start, after an introduction about New Orleans — actually, you know a film’s not the best when your favourite thing is the opening and ending credits. Which was the case here, they have some fun New Orleans scenery, establishing shots with a brass band.

Ren: Have even of you seen the recent Interview with the Vampire adaptation, it’s very good. It’s reminding me of that because it’s set in New Orleans and they have this big mansion where they live their dissolute vampire lives. I do recommend it.

Adam: That would be good because I’m always waiting for the sequel to Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines which is based on the White Wolf roleplaying game that I played at uni. It’s based on the early 2000s roleplaying game, and it was quite buggy on release but got patched, but the sequel has been in development for years.

Cara Ellison was writing the script, I really like her writing, she used to be a games journalist and I met her very briefly at an event and was very enthusiastic and dorky and awkward. I tend to get very awkward when I meet someone whose art or writing I enjoy and manage to just be weird. I was excited about that but then she was taken off the project and the whole thing fell apart. So a new good vampire thing would be good. What’s it on?

Ren: Oh, I don’t know. You know, one of the ones that I watched legally that I just can’t remember the name of at this very moment. Yeah.

Adam: Yeah. Now TV maybe. So anyway, after we get to New Orleans we have Gabby and Travis rocking up to the house, they’ve bought the haunted mansion to move there, not much explanation about why this decrepit looking mansion except that Gabby thought it would make a change, fair enough.

It’s Travis, her kid who sees this suit of armour that seems to move and reappear in different places, and then starts getting spooked out, encounters the Hat Box Man and then is faced very briefly with the optical effect of the ever-expanding corridor. You only really get a glimpse of it but it’s bought back later when Ben the scientist is trying to escape and run away, and he’s running down the corridor which extends. Which is fairly effective but I prefer the idea of it being used as a trap.

Ren: In the Muppets one at least there’s two version, the one that I was thinking of is the extending downwards parlour room where the paintings stretch downwards as the lift descends, but there’s also the extending horizontal corridor.

Adam: Oh right the descending downwards one is used almost like an escape room in the ’23 version. I can’t quite be sure what they're trying to escape, probably Jared Leto, and they have to clamber up the paintings. It’s all a bit crystal maze basically.

What about in the Eddie Murphy is there still the elevator or a vertical extension? Presumably there’s still these paintings, because the paintings that change are a big part of the theme park ride.

Ailish: Yes, their eyes follow you as the characters are walking along the corridor and at one point how Eddie Murphy gets out of his secret passage, and when he comes to the end there’s two eyeholes. The camera shows from the other side and there’s his eyes in this portrait and it’s a door and he comes through.

Ren: There’s paintings in this one, and marble busts, as well.

Ailish: They sing, don’t they?

Ren: There are songs in this one but the busts don’t actually sing. They’re just a cameo for Beaker and… Beaker’s friend. I’m not the best at my Muppets identification.

Adam: Yeah, I always just think of them in terms of Muppets Christmas Carol, so they’re the charity workers who Michael Caine is so mean to.

Ailish: In the Eddie Murphy version the singing busts are outside on the way to the graveyard. So Jim and the kids have to find this key, this is the key to breaking the curse but they start singing and annoying him as he’s going past.

He’s already freaked out because he’s going into the graveyard and he has to open this black crypt and take this key from a skeleton’s hand, so these singing busts really annoy him. But at the end the family do get to go on their adventure, with a few special guests. So they have Madame Leota in the back seat and they’ve strapped the four singing busts to the back of their car singing away as the car’s driving off.

Ren: In the Muppets Madame Leota is Madame Pigota played by Miss Piggy, who turns up for a little seance. She looks radiant, it’s a very good look for Miss Piggy in her crystal ball, not very much in the way of plot, she’s just there. She shows them to the next bit of the ride, I guess.

Adam: In the ’23 one Madame Leota is up in the attic in the crystal ball played by Jamie Lee Curtis, not her greatest performance but she goes for it, it’s fairly scenery chewing. She’s been imprisoned there by the Hat Box Man and summoned and She’s a helpful guide who like Miss Piggy points them in the next direction.

Ren: The Hat Box Man is Fozzie Bear, by the way.

Adam Ooh, that sounds quite scary.

Ren He doesn’t have a massive role, he’s just there in the ballroom scene which I guess is the next set piece

Adam: Now I’m picturing Jared Leto dressed up as Fozzie bear and I feel kind of sick.

Ren: Urgh, I’m sorry. After they’ve seen Madame Pigota they kind of get in the extending corridor and Sweetums drives them on a food trolley down to the haunted ballroom —

Adam: I love Sweetums.

Ren: That was one I had to look up, I was like “who’s this big hairy muppet” and that’s Sweetums. I’m quite a late-comer to the Muppets I didn’t see a muppets film until I was an adult.

Ailish: Me too, actually

Adam: Oh, I really loved Mupppets Christmas Carol and Treasure Island as a kid. I swear I played an interactive CD-Rom of Muppets Treasure Island. Quite a lot of my childhood was playing interactive CD-Roms from the library, clicking on things to get comic sound effects, that was all the gameplay I needed. And then I went to the cinema to see Muppets in Space which I was deeply disappointed by. I wonder if I should rewatch it, if it was better than I remembered, but it was about Gonzo going into space to find out about his alien parentage.

Ren: Nonbinary icon Gonzo.

Adam: Gonzo was always my favourite. I always liked Gonzo, but if you look at the Muppets show, and look at the puppet Gonzo from the first series he looks really wretched. They really cleaned Gonzo up.

Ren: My Texture of the Week is Gonzo related, so shall we do that?

(assorted rattling)

Adam: I’ve got some pick-up sticks!

Ren: Sorry about this Ailish!

Ren and Adam Texture of the Week! Texture of the Week!

Ren Would you like to go first Ailish?

Ailish: Yes, okay, thank you. So for the Texture of the Week segment I thought that the feeling of the glass bowl that Madame Leota’s head in it would be good. It’s round, it’s quite cold and it’s heavy with her head inside.

I actually have a halloween decoration and it’s a glass bowl and there is a woman’s head inside it. Van you hear that? (scratching noise on glass) That kind of glass noise, if you like.

Ren: Amazing!

Adam: It’s really nice to have a smooth texture actually, because I think me and Ren often have rough scrabbly textures. So Ren, you have a Gonzo related texture?

Ren: Yes, so when Gonzo is in Room 999 having to face his fear, he is confronted with an older version of herself, and then an even older version of himself, and as he grows old his nose shrivels like a carrot, and withers, so Gonzo’s withered carrot nose is my texture.

Adam: Oh dear, that’s awful! Mine is crunchy scrambled eggs. There’s a scene where Gabby is making food for all the crew and one of those kooky ghosts keeps messing with her cooking and smashes the eggs in the frying pan and she’s so fed up she just goes along with it, like whatever, so she just serves up the scrambled eggs with the shards of eggshell in it.

Ren: Like in We Need To Talk About Kevin

Adam: Yes, like that! So there’s a close-up of crunchy scrambled eggs.

Ren That’s upsetting. Were you making notes in the cinema, by the way?

Adam Well, yes, I was. Because actually irritatingly in my notebook, which says on the front ‘Written and Directed by Adam’, which is a notebook that some of my film students got for me when I was leaving for the Netherlands, rather sweetly. But I could tell I was doing it in the cinema because I was eating boiled sweets, and there’s the sticky luminous residue of crunched boiled sweets between two of pages here, quite unpleasantly.

It was quite dark in the cinema so my notes are legible but they’re a bit messy, I don’t know what anyone would have thought about the fact I was taking this film so seriously I was making notes. I have “Ghost winks” in quotation marks, which is the kind of sentimental term for when a ghost gives you a friendly reminder it exists, so if your beloved Grandma loved eating Wotsits, and then you went into a room and there was a sudden bag of Wotsits on the sofa — this is quite similar to the actual example, by the way — it was probably Cheetos or an American variant, but if there was a sudden bag of Wotsits that would be a ghost wink.

Ren: I see.

Adam: There were quite a lot of attempts at sentimentality in this film, and it’s a film about a haunted mansion and kooky ghosts, it didn’t really need the sentimentality to be honest. It seemed like that worked better in the Eddie Murphy version, Ailish, you seemed to quite like the idea that family are brought together by this experience.

Ailish: Yes, I did like that. I suppose it’s like the juxtaposition between child and adult viewpoints, because they’re each overcoming their own fears.

In the beginning Jim, Eddie Murphy’s character is like “I don’t believe in ghosts”, no chance, and then when he meets Madame Leota he’s trapped in the chair and he’s spinning round chanting “There’s no place like home” from the Wizard of Oz, which is quite funny, he is scared then throughout the house.

Michael, his son, has a serious fear of spiders, which is shown before they got to the mansion and then there’s a part where Jim and his daughter Megan get stuck in the mausoleum and Michael has to open the door from the other side when it’s covered in spiders. He debates about it, they’re being chased by zombies and he does take his time about deciding to open the door but he eventially does.

Megan has a fear of never leaving the mansion, and Sarah, Jim’s wife is also afraid of losing her family because Ramsely threatens the children which is why she agrees to the marriage between herself and Edward the ghost. So they all have something to overcome and the fear and tension and anxiety that they all experienced in the house prompted the change in their family dynamic.

Jim had been a workaholic and there had been a disconnect whereas at the end they’re happy as, getting to go on an adventure. It’s a nice shift from the start of the film, so that’s where the sentimentality comes in, but throughout the film there are a few jump scares and moments where you wonder what’s going to happen next, but it does work out in the end.

Adam: There aren’t really many jump scares or scares fullstop in the ’23 version. The only sequence is when they go up into the attic and there’s the ghost Bluebeard type figure, who beheaded all their husbands. So there was the ghost of an axe basically and the axe crashes down, and the ghost tries to behead Ben.

Ren: I think she’s called Constance

Adam: Okay, so the scene with Constance was a little bit scary, That was probably the most effective scene I’d say. Is Constacne in the Eddie Murphy one then?

Ailish: No, that’s what I found quite interesting, because the story of the attraction is about this bride looking for her lost lover but in the Eddie Murphy version it’s the husband that is looking for the lost bride and the bride is portrayed as a really lovely, really friendly figure and the butler is the main villain. He didn’t think she was good enough to marry the master of the manor which is why he killed her.

Ren: I watched a video about the development of the Haunted Mansion ride and It was saying that the person who was originally tasked to come up with the plot came up with four or five different plots that Walt Disney rejected before it found its final form, so I wonder if the Eddie Murphy one is based on one of the earlier plots, some of them rejected as too dark.

Ailish: The doppelgänger element definitely adds to the eerie feeling. Elizabeth was the master’s bride to be and Sarah is Eddie Murphy’s wife and they there are the spitting image of each other. Sarah wears the wedding dress that Elizabeth never had the change to when she’s going through with the wedding to the master of the house and it definitely gives a very creepy feeling.

Adam: That sounds like an interesting device, it reminds me of Francis Ford Cappella’s version of Bram Stroker’s Dracula which obviously sticks pretty closely to the novel but also adds in that idea of Jonathan Harker’s girlfriend, she’s the spitting image and possibly the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler’s lover and Dracula is Vlad the Impaler and that’s why he falls in love with her. I think that can be quite a useful device.

Are there any good gravestones in your films? There were some comedy gravestones in the ’23 version which where kind of fun. The best one that I wrote down was: “A maid who liked to misbehave, now does so in her grave!”

Ren: The Muppets uses the ones from the ride, there’s one that’s like Cousin Hewitt whose ghost appears in a striped prison outfit and it says “we all know you didn’t do it” and he winks. And there’s a woman who was a writer but her ink was poisoned and she died by her quill.

Adam: It sounds like there’s a graveyard scene in the Eddie Murphy one as well?

Ailish: When the family first arrived at the mansion they explore round the back, and the kids are absolutely horrified that there’s a graveyard in the back garden and Eddie Murphy is like “We just won’t put that on the ad.”

But apart from the fact that they go into the mausoleum there’s no mention of the other graves that I can remember, anyway.

Adam: So is the Eddie Murphy one set entirely within the haunted mansion?

Ailish: Yes. It starts with Eddie Murphy closing a deal on a house and he misses his wedding anniversary dinner. So he comes home and he’s all apologetic and says we’ll go on an adventure this weekend. Sarah’s all excited and goes to tell the kids, and meanwhile she gets this really creepy phone call to say come to the address and when she writes down the address, Eddie Murphy realises that it’s a mansion and he says that they’ll take a pit stop - 20 minutes tops! that’s his catch phrase during the film, because nothing takes 20 minutes.

When they get there the gates are locked, they can’t get in but then gates open themselves, and the same thing with the front door. Which I think is very cool because the idea of the door separates them from the real world but when they cross the threshold they’re in the ghost spooky world. Which you can see even in Disneys Monsters Inc, Boo’s bedroom door separates locations in the real world on one side and from Monsters Incorporatd on the other. Even in Coraline we have the little cupboard door that separates the two houses.

Adam: And it sounds like with the Muppets the whole film takes place within the haunted mansion?

Ren: Yeah. Just the taxi ride there and back otherwise it’s entirely in the house.

Adam: Yeah, because one of the issues with the ’23 one is they keep leaving the mansion.

Ren Oh really?

Adam Yeah! A lot! this gaggle of characters don’t arrive all at once, so first they recruit Ben, then Father Kent, then Harriet and then Bruce, so they have to go out to meet Harriet, and then go out to a university lecture to meet Bruce.

Ren: I don’t think you can keep leaving the haunted house, that’s not how it works.

Adam: I know! it makes it a lot less threatening, because they keep leaving. And they try to explain this by saying that the ghosts can follow them out of the mansion and there’s one nice bit with a sea captain ghost, or a sailor, who haunts ben and floods his apartment basically, which is why he then returns to the mansion.

But that’s partly why it doesn’t sustain a creepy atmosphere because they keep walking out of the mansion. So it never really feels as claustrophobic as it should feel, really.

And it’s a bit confusing, I should add, because there's two mansions which I didn’t really understand. Because there’s the haunted mansion but then they have to go to Crump Manor.

Ren Right…

Adam Because the Hat Box Man ghost, his skeleton is there, and to dispel him they need to get his head or something, oh and he didn’t actually die in the haunted mansion he died down the road in Crump Manor, so we’re not even in the Haunted Mansion anymore!

Ren That’s strange. Odd choice! Is Crump Manor another ride?

Adam: I’ll look it up, it sounds like it should be a ride. Crump Manor. No, I’ve just gone to the wiki and it’s just referencing the ’23 film so it’s a strange innovation.

There is an Elizabeth Adam Crump health and rehab centre, which is a nursing home in Virginia, but I think that’s unrelated. One star review on google reviews, on June 16th I received two calls abut his eating from a speech therapist. One star. Well, it’s not really the speech therapist’s remit, to be fair. One star.

Ren: Shall we go to the ballroom?

Adam: Oh yeah, the ballroom isn’t given nearly enough time in the ’23 version, basically. The ballroom’s left to the end credits, so you get a nice dance in the end credits in the ballroom but you don’t really see it before then. As I said the opening and end credits are the best part of this film.

Ren: What about the Eddie Murphy version?

Ailish: Yes, this happens when Edward is trying to woo Sarah, and she is fascinated by the architecture of the house and he’s showing her the rooms. He’s referring to himself as his great-grandfather and explaining his great-grandfather’s tragic story, even though it’s his own. They’re in the ballroom and he’s like “Don’t you remember?” and she’s like, “Remember what?” and he says "We were here and we were dancing” and all the ghosts appear, freaking her out, but he’s so convinced that she’s Elizabeth so he’s trying to show her the last room they were in together and it was the ballroom.

Adam: what about in the muppets?

Ren: Sweetums drives them down on the food trolley and there’s a show going on with Fozzie Bear as the Hat Box Man, I think he’s trying to do comedy and he’s not doing very well. Kermit-ghost is the compere of the show and then they sing a song to welcome their new guests about how they’re all stuck in the house for eternity and they’ll join them too. It’s quite fun! it’s the showiest bit of the film, you have the heckling muppets.

Adam: Oh Statler and Waldorf?

Ren: Possibly!

Adam: Muppets fans are going to be annoyed with us about this episode.

Ren: I’m sorry Muppet fans I'm doing my best!

Adam Yeah, that’s it, Statler and Waldorf, they’re the two old muppets men up in the balcony.

Ren Yep, so they’re having a heckle, and I don’t know if there’s that much more to it, to be honest,

Adam: I mean, I found the best adaptation of the Haunted Mansion anyway which I sent you, of the ballroom scene. Posted by Classics of Game which is apparently the unreleased gameboy advance version of The Haunted Mansion, in which you play some kind of goth Miley Cyrus walking around the ballroom with various ghosts and a weird evil flower vine and I think the butler’s there, floating.

Ren: Very Halloween pinball vibes.

Adam: Yeah, Halloween pinball vibes, classic.

Ren: I did want to mention the sceaming goat. Didn’t really have anywhere to put it but there’s a goat that turns up and screams. Closest thing to a jumpscare. Did either of you have a screaming goat?

Adam: No.

Ailish:No.

Adam: That sounds like a Muppets joke to me. That does sound like a great idea for a ghost train though. the most I’ve ever been scared in ghost trains are when the ride operator turns up at the end to stop the carriage, just doing their job and I just screamed at them.

I went on a terrible ghost train in a carpark, none of the lights worked, it was literally a dark ride, totally anticlimactic and then at the end when the person came to stop the carriage I really screamed at them. But you know, bring a goat into a ghost train and have a goat scream at the ride goers, if you’re setting up a ghost train on a farm, bring on a goat.

Ren: Maybe you can do that when you finally realise your ghost train dreams?

Adam: This is what I’ve said on the podcast before, I’ve always said that if I won the lottery the money wouldn’t go into charitable endeavours, all my money would go into ghost trains. I don’t understand these millionaires spending money on fast trains or champagne, you should just hire people to design ghost trains with your own custom monsters, I can’t see why you would want to spend money on anything else.

Ren: Any final thoughts on our respective haunted mansions? Anything we would like to see in a fourth Haunted Mansion film?

Ailish: Something I thought the 2003 version did really well, I watched it as a child it was my favourite halloween film but obviously I watched it as an adult for this episode and it also appealed to older viewers.

There’s a scene where they’re in the graveyard and the ghosts are all floating around and Michael says the iconic line from the Sixth Sense “I see dead people”, and I was laughing along going “oh I know what that’s from”.

And then there’s a scene with an old telephone, and I was going don’t answer the phone, don’t answer the phone, but of course he answers it and on the other end it’s Ramsley who he doesn’t say anything but he knows Jim’s exact location because he answered the phone. So it’s very atmospheric, very creepy, and you really get the feeling that this butler is evil.

Ren: More creepiness, I think.

Adam: I’d like to have seen more done with the paintings, actually being able to enter the paintings, because then you could have the film could go into different styles, you could have them go into a cubist painting or an impressionist painting or you could have the ghosts looking like a strange Picasso-like ghost for instance.

Ren: That’s a cool idea! I would like any future adaptations to have someone with a French fish in their pocket because that was my favourite part.

Adam: Are you hoping for a spin-off film just about the French fish. Presumably this was a muppet fish, or was it an actual fish? A live fish?

Ren: It looked like those Japanese fish pastries, sweet pastries in the shape of a fish. It looked like one of those. Which I guess is just a fish, but that shape of fish. Yeah.

Adam: What did Maki think of it?

Ren: No, I just told her about it, and she expressed her disappointment about the lack of Rizzo. I mean Rizzo was there, he had a little cameo, but not enough Rizzo.

Adam: Was the Swedish chef in it?

Ren: He was. He was the ballroom meal and he said he was going to cater the funeral meal for Gonzo and Pepe, and the subtitles underneath said “speaking Swedish” and I was like, is he? Is that Swedish? I think that was a little bit generous.

Adam: I feel like if you’re making a horror muppets the Swedish chef is quite scary to be honest. In terms of muppets video game adaptations there was a Muppets doom clone, like Doom but you’re playing the Swedish chef and you’re fighting giant vegetables I can’t swear 100% but I’m pretty sure that exists.

Ren: Well, thank you very much Ailish for joining us on this experimentally slightly chaotic episode about the various Haunted Mansions, it’s been really great to have you here!

Adam Yeah, thank you, it’s been really nice.

Ren: Do you want people to find you anywhere? Or do you just want to be a mysterious voice in the ether?

Ailish: No, I’m on Twitter as Ailish Brassil so easy to find!

Ren: If you enjoyed this episode you can leave a review, it’s always nice, and you can email us at stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com, twitter at @stillscaredpod and instagram at @stillscaredpodcast.

Adam: You’re going to have to make a collage for this!

Ren: I am! This is my resolution to make a collage for each episode on Instagram, so that’s the little extra treat you get if you follow us on Instagram. Do you have a sign-off for us Adam?

Adam: Don’t tell your speech therapist about your diet, creepy kids, it’s wrong, you shouldn’t tell them.

Ren: One Star!

Adam: One Star!

Ren: See you later, creepy kids! Bye!

Adam: Bye!

Ailish: Bye!