A Bag Of Wotsits On The Sofa

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