There’s no age limit on when somebody can become fully invested in horror, but if it happens when you’re a youngster, then the best bet is to ease yourself into the genre instead of diving straight in at the deep end. With that in mind, Eddie Murphy’s awful The Haunted Mansion has finally gotten around to winning some praise 20 years on from its theatrical bow.
The comedian and actor’s career wasn’t exactly in the rudest health at the time of the fantastical blockbuster’s release, with the steady paychecks of the Shrek franchise being offset by a slew of terrible comedies that more often than not found themselves torn apart by critics and sinking at the box office.
The Haunted Mansion may have ticked one of those boxes after racking up a dismal 14 percent Rotten Tomatoes score and 31 percent audience approval rating, but it did at least manage to haul in $182 million at the box office. Disney has a reboot on the way, but it’s Murphy’s grating spin on the beloved theme park attraction that’s been landing some backhanded compliments at long last.
A Reddit thread posits that The Haunted Mansion is the ideal film to get newbies into tales of terror, whether it’s children or general scaredy cats. There’s also the nostalgia value that could see the generation who witnessed it in theaters pass it down to the next generation, so we could end up living in a world where a widely-panned and largely forgotten Disney dud could end up carving out a reputation as one of the most quietly influential horror titles of the modern era, a development nobody could have seen coming.