The Disney Frontier Blog

If I had a really good camera, my photos of the Haunted Mansion in holiday mode would have turned out much better. In fact, upon reviewing them I have decided not to even use them. Luckily, there is a great gallery of lovely pictures available online at DIS. They are to be credited for this shot of the mansion exterior at dusk. Beautiful.

Oh, and spoilers will follow, so if you haven’t seen the movie or want to be surprised by the ride, skip this post!

According to what I’ve heard, anyone visiting Disneyland between early October and New Year’s is now treated to a new version of the Haunted Mansion ride. Themed on the sweetly dark little Tim Burton/Disney gem The Nightmare Before Christmas, the “Haunted Mansion Holiday” tells the story of Jack Skellington’s brief career as Sandy Claws. Keith and I were lucky enough to see it on our Halloween trip, about two years after we found out about the change and vowed to experience it for ourselves.

Now, I absolutely love the Haunted Mansion. It’s arguably one of my favorite rides in the park, and I never miss it. I’ve always been fond of most macabre, spooky, goth-influenced books, music, films, and so-forth. I went in expecting to be a solid proponent of the Nightmare Before Christmas makeover.

The outside of the mansion was awesome. There was a twisted clock face hanging from the upper balcony, a grove of jack-o-lanterns staked in place on the hill, and, at night, the glow of hundreds of candles and lit pumpkins along the porches. Like I said, beautiful — and much darker than most Disney fare.

Thinking back to the movie, there are two distinct themes carried out in Tim Burton’s visual style. There’s the dark, creepy Jack and Sally imagery of HalloweenTown.

And there’s the sweet, fluffy, day-glo glitter of ChristmasTown. In the film, these thematic elements work together to tell the story. The Haunted Mansion Holiday sort of merges the two, with day-glo winning out and Oogie Boogie more prominently featured than Sally, or other characters that are more Halloween.

If you like the Christmas element of the movie, you’ll absolutely love the ride. If you’re looking for the Halloween element (which we were, of course, on Halloween weekend), you’ll catch it mixed in more subtly. Zero floating in place of the floating candleabra, the pile of jack-o-lanterns in the snow, and the mini-Sally along the last few moments of the ride, were the shining moments for me.

I left the ride glad that I saw it once, but sorry that I wouldn’t get a chance to visit the real Haunted Mansion this trip. And I was also surprised that the Jack and Sally store, relocated to a new space in New Orleans, seemed not to have as much fun Nightmare stuff as it has in years past. Still, the experience was worth the fastpass for me, even just to know I was seeing something that only a small percentage of park visitors ever get to see.