As someone who grew up in the early 2000s, before Disney truly latched onto their formula of adapting their classic IP into live-action blockbusters, I have a lot of fondness for their 2003 film The Haunted Mansion. It was the first real “scary” movie I ever watched — though I would later grow to become a horror obsessive — and it introduced me to the iconic Jennifer Tillylong before I’d ever see Bride of Chucky. It remains a favorite for me, but even then: I’m an adult. I can admit when a movie I love is bad. And I’m a fan of a lot of those.
Long before audiences caught remake fatigue over films likeThe Little Mermaid andBeauty and the Beast, Haunted Mansion was, without a doubt, a bit of a stinker. Despite earning double its $90 million production budget, the choice to turn the Gothic attraction into a family-friendly comedy starring Eddie Murphy didn’t sit well with many fans of the Disney theme-park attraction. Even worse was the choice to forego modeling the plot after the ride itself, instead only featuring its iconic ghosts and ghouls in small roles, save for a few.
For me, though, one of those few is where the movie gets its chance to shine. While most of the film is dedicated to Murphy’s Jim Evers trying to escape the clutches of Terence Stamp’s ghostly Ramsley, anyone familiar with the ride will recognize the name Master Gracey, which adorns a tombstone in the ride’s winding queue. In the movie's case, he’s more than just a name, portrayed in flesh and blood (well, maybe that’s debatable) by Nathaniel Parker as the owner of the mansion, a man in a deep depression after having lost the love of his life.
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It’s a plot that draws from certain elements of the ride — including the hanged body guests see in the Stretching Room — but largely exists on a plane of its own, as audiences come to realize that the Evers family was drawn to the mansion because Gracey believes Jim’s wife Sara (Marsha Thompson) bears a striking resemblance to Gracey’s lost love, the one thing keeping him tied to the mansion as a tortured ghost. It’s that plan that Jim must thwart, bringing him into contact not only with the ghosts of the mansion, but with its tragic backstory as well.
For a movie whose major set pieces hinge on the cheesy jokes typical of early aughts Disney Channel, it’s a surprisingly dark plot, plucked more from the pages of a Bronte novel than a Disney film. (Ironic, given Parker once played a version of Mr. Rochester.) Gracey is gaslit by Ramsley into believing that he needs to kill Sara so he and his love can be together, and it culminates in one of the most disturbing sequences I’ve ever seen in a Disney film, a ghostly wedding that ends with someone being dragged into hell — take that, Sam Raimi!
But it’s not just the child-friendly introduction into real horror that makes Gracey’s plot stand out for me, though it was my very first glimpse at the genre. While it never goes so far as to actually kill anyone (or at least, anyone who wasn’t already dead), that plotline did spark something for me: a lifelong love of Gothic romance, that dark and twisted thing that Guillermo del Torowould go on to perfect in Crimson Peak. In fact, Master Gracey shares more DNA with Thomas Sharpe than one might think, and buried under the corny jokes and impressive Rick Baker effects is a tale deserving of a reexamination, especially in light of 2023’s spooky new reboot.
A Nod to the Haunted Mansion Ride's History
While the rest of the film uses the Haunted Mansion’s iconography as merely the starting point for jokes or special effects, the tragic tale of Edward Gracey is a piece of storytelling that ties directly back to the ride’s gruesome origins originally set out by Walt Disney and his Imagineers. Before it became the friendly attraction we all know and love, the Haunted Mansion was originally envisioned as a walkthrough attraction, one with deadly, Bluebeard-esque pirates and an energy closer to that of a Vincent Pricefilm than the cohort of happy haunts park guests encounter every day. Those dark origins are beloved by fans the world over, and Haunted Mansion obsessives pore over the details of abandoned plot lines and clues hidden in plain sight, each with a personal favorite. (Mine is the Witch of Walpurgis, who still exists in one of Florida’s changing portraits.)
Brides and weddings, in particular, have always been a key part of the Haunted Mansion’s story. Early concepts featured a bride named Priscilla, subsequently killed by her pirate husband, Captain Gore, while others highlighted voodoo queens and vampires whose marriages brought about the mansion’s downfall. Best known, perhaps, is the ride’s Attic Bride, whose many iterations all reflect death and destruction, particularly Constance Hatchaway, a black widow bride who murdered all five of her husbands. Paris’s version took it even further than that, too, rebranding the mansion as Phantom Manor and focusing its entire story around a doomed young bride whose groom was killed by the ghost of her vengeful father.
So it seems only natural that, given 90 minutes to play with the concept of life after death, screenwriter David Berenbaum would put his focus on a doomed romance. Turning him from just a name (speculated to be that of the ride’s well-known Ghost Host) into a fleshed-out character, Parker’s Gracey becomes the central cog in a story that hits all the beats of a Gothic romance — a genre largely defined by its supernatural and horror-adjacent elements. A spurned lover who kills himself after being duped by someone he trusts, only to be tortured by a never-ending afterlife on Earth? Someone call Edgar Allan Poe. The mansion also provides the perfect, genre-typical setting: a gloomy, empty mansion, filled with a foreboding atmosphere and brooding, untrustworthy characters. While the film’s brides (either Elizabeth or Sara) are not the central protagonists of the film, they are central to the plot, as is tradition with many Gothic stories, and the house itself is a vessel that only enhances their emotions. Much like the attraction, the heavily decorated and expansive setting is the perfect proscenium stage for a wild and unbelievable story, with new details to be uncovered around every corner, if you’re willing to look.
Nathaniel Parker Gives a Performance to Die For
But the mansion itself isn’t doing all the heavy lifting. Anyone with a childhood fondness for the film will tell you that it’s Parker’s performance that makes it, sharpened by a career on the stage that makes for the perfect tragic hero, all booming voice and anxious desperation for Sara to recognize him. It’s a performance not without its own kind of melodrama, but that fits in a story like this, which is already outlandish (in a good way) without the added layer of jokes and CGI. Gracey recounting the story of his life and death is easily the most compelling part of the film, cut through as it is, and it’s almost sorrowful rather than scary to watch, a rare occurrence in a Disney film.
And while Gracey receives the kind of happy ending traditional Gothic heroes never do, his romance with Elizabeth exists in a very similar vein to one that Disney offered up earlier that same year: that of Elizabeth Swann and Will Turner in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, another film adapted from a classic attraction. While Pirates would go on to be far more successful than Murphy’s Mansion movie, the two share DNA in their subplots, both of which seem inspired by classic clinch cover romance novels of years past: one a swashbuckler and the other Gothic. Both b-plots contain a grandeur that’s since been lost by Disney films, which now feel the need to couch surface-level white feminism before they’ll let anybody fall in love. While The Haunted Mansion proves that love can sometimes be destructive, it’s also proof that love, requited or otherwise, is more than enough to be the backbone of a story, a twist on the classic fairy tales the company became known for. Anyone with a penchant for romance will argue that romance — a still flourishing genre despite many reports — comes in many forms, and The Haunted Mansion follows a rich tradition of them, despite the fact that the film faded into relative obscurity, nearly locked in the Disney vault until the creation of Disney+.
While the original Gracey tombstone was a nod to Disney Imagineer Yale Gracey, The Haunted Mansion’s reinvention of the home’s history pays homage to not only the creators behind the attraction, but also the long and winding storytelling history that helped create it, populated by authors like Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë and stories wrapped up in what happens when love goes wrong. Sure, the jokes around it haven’t aged well, and maybe Justin Simien’sHaunted Mansion will be 10 times better, but I can’t shake my fondness for its core story, a foundational piece in my life for romance and the macabre — because despite what some people might tell you, those two pair together perfectly.
