Filmmaker Justin Simien has shared new details about the alternate ending for Disney’s family supernatural horror feature “Haunted Mansion”.
The film’s basic plot sees a woman and her son enlist a motley crew of so-called spiritual experts to help rid their home of supernatural squatters. LaKeith Stanfield, Danny DeVito, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, Jamie Lee Curtis, Rosario Dawson, and Jared Leto star.
Whilst reviews for the overall film are tepid, Stanfield has drawn almost universal praise for his committed performance as Ben, a tour guide grieving over his dead wife, Alyssa.
Speaking with THR, Simien talked about earlier versions of the film, which added more elements of Ben and Alyssa’s storyline, including a ghost version of Alyssa. Simien says:
“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.
He added they shot “so much movie” that there’s “probably a four-hour version” they could create that “nobody would want to sit through”. It took various test screenings and studio involvement to get it down to the theatrical cut they have now.
That includes the typical Disney happy ending, but Simien says initially that things were going to finish on a darker note:
“The first version of the movie that I encountered had a bit 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.”
Disney’s “Haunted Mansion” is currently in cinemas, where it’s tipped to drop a fairly steep 63% in its second weekend at the box-office.
