Disney’s ‘Haunted Mansion’ Almost Had A Much Darker Ending
The following post contains Haunted Mansion spoilers. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, turn back now!
When Justin Simien set out to direct Haunted Mansion, he wanted to create a film that challenged its young audience with darker themes. In the same way that the death of Bambi’s mother, or Musfassa falling into the stampede in The Lion King have been burned into the collective memory of generations of fans, Simien wanted to create a film that would stick..
With that being said, creating a film with Disney is a balancing act and one that Simien deftly worked in Haunted Mansion. While the film has its dark moments, it ends on a note of hope and joy.
A Darker Ending Was Planned
According to Simien however, that wasn’t always the case:
“The epilogue was certainly a late addition. The first version of the movie that I encountered had a bit more of a darker ending, one that I actually really respected and enjoyed, but I correctly guessed that it maybe wouldn’t get past the sort of Disney machine. But once we cast LaKeith, there was something that changed about what I personally needed from the ending of the movie. Frankly, I didn’t want to see a Black man have a tragic end in a movie like this.”
“I wanted him to have hope at the end of the movie, and a tragic end for a Black character would’ve been really hard to swallow, at least for me right now. So we went with something a bit more hopeful, but there was probably something to the other version as well,” he recalls.
The Film Was Going to Heavily Feature Alyssa’s Ghost
At its heart, Haunted Mansion is a movie about grief. The film’s lead LaKeith Stanfield’s Ben is a former astrophysicist whose life has been shattered by the death of his wife Alyssa.
The longing to be with his wife and the temptation to end his own life in order to be with her is a bubbling subtext throughout the movie.
Throughout his journey inside the mansion, Ben wonders and hopes that its supernatural powers will allow him to speak to his wife again.
Interestingly, According to Simien, the idea of Alyssa, and her ghost once played a larger part in the script.
“You kind of see some remnants of it. There’s a dream sequence where, for a moment, we see Ben follow her through the house. I actually really felt strongly that what wakes Ben up again inside of the house is the potential to find her with his camera. He’s presumably been using it to find her, unsuccessfully, so that remains as a bit of subtext in this version of the movie. But there certainly were some more overt searching-for-Alyssa scenes and ideas in different forms of the movie.”
“We shot so much movie. (Laughs.) There’s probably a four-hour version of the movie that nobody would want to sit through, including myself. It has different possibilities of what could have happened between Ben entering the house and the group finally exiting the house and deciding to come back to it on their own. But through the process of just testing it and working with the Disney team, that’s not exactly the version that we ended up with.”
Striking a Balance
In the end, Simien achieved his goal. He created a movie that was not only a love letter to Haunted Mansion, but a memorable movie that tackled the hard issues of loss, grief, and regret.
Haunted Mansion is in theaters now.
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