“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, concerning those who are asleep, so that you will not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We live in a hard, sad world. We are surrounded by brokenness everywhere we look. It takes all different forms and shapes and sizes. But the worst brokenness of all is death. Death takes us away from life and purpose and meaning and everyone and everything we love and who loves us. It is a profound disruption of our lives whenever it occurs. And so, when we face it, we grieve. Yet how we grieve matters and says a lot about how we happen to see the world. Disney’s latest film offering, The Haunted Mansion, takes us right into the thick of these big, hard questions, and forces us to reckon with them. Let’s talk about the movie today and why it’s not what you might think.

Now, if you’ve never heard of the movie or seen any of its previews, that introduction makes it sound like kind of a dark and depressing journey through an exceedingly heavy subject. Given that I said it is the latest film offering from Disney, you might be asking yourself if Disney has further lost its mind and started producing works that are wildly out of their usual wheelhouse of fun and family-friendly fare (at least when they aren’t creating expensive box office bombs packed with entirely unnecessary woke elements and themes, but that’s a conversation for another time). You might also remember going to Magic Kingdom when you were little, riding the Haunted Mansion ride, and thinking it was just mostly lighthearted and silly. Why wouldn’t they make the film like the ride.

They did. The movie is mostly lighthearted, silly, fun, and family-friendly. Some of the mild horror elements can get a little intense for younger kids. (Our youngest stayed in my lap for most of the movie.) There are several jump-scare moments. But on the whole, it really does capture the spirit of the ride that so many folks remember so fondly from a childhood trip to Disney. It tells an engaging story that actually has a lot of heart to it. The cast features several veterans with great comedic chops, and while most of the characters aren’t terribly well-developed (including the ghosts who steal the show by the end of the movie), they are all played pretty well. It also happens to be a story about processing grief…another Disney story about processing grief. That makes it the fourth Disney release with processing grief as its primary theme in four years. Perhaps we should be paying attention.

The movie is about a woman (Rosario Dawson) who moves from New York to Louisiana with her son (Chase Dillon) to an old, antebellum mansion in need of some love in hopes of making a new life for the two of them for reasons we are not given until later. Upon arriving on an appropriately dark and stormy night to the very obviously haunted mansion, a haunted suit of armor greets them in the foyer, sending the two of them heading for the hills. Unfortunately, the ghosts follow them and force them to return to the mansion where several months later, they mostly just stay camped out in the safety of the living room.

In their attempts to deal with their extensive ghost problem, she reaches out to a man pretending to be a priest (Owen Wilson), although she doesn’t know it. He, in turn, seeks the help of an astrophysicist (LaKeith Stanfield) who supposedly created a camera with a lens that can capture “ghost particles,” and who happens to still be grieving over the loss of his beloved wife. Eventually they also draft a second-rate medium (Tiffany Haddish) and a local historian (Danny DeVito) to aid in their quest to solve the mystery of the house and its many spirits.

Eventually they discover that a century or so before, a man living there lost his beloved wife. In his grief he reached out to a famous medium named Madame Leota (Jamie Lee Curtis) who began trying to contact her for him so he could connect with her one more time. His wife’s spirit, though, was at peace and had passed on. Each time Madame Leota made contact with the spirit world for him, she brought another spirit into the house. Eventually, in her searching, she accidentally raised the spirit of Alistair Crump. Crump was the son of the original owner of the house. When his own mother died, his mean father refused to let him grieve, pushing him down a dark path that led to his becoming a wealthy serial killer skilled in occult practices. His goal was to steal 1000 souls to give himself great power. He was eventually stopped and killed by the local townspeople, but he had continued his quest from the other side of the grave. Now, he needed just one more willing soul to give up their life, and he would have his 1000.

Early on in the film we are told that grief is a very powerful emotion that can be used to contact the spirit world. But it can also be used by forces on the other side to manipulate us. This gradually becomes the main plot device of the film. Crump’s ghost (Jared Leto) manipulates his victims by using their grief combined with the false promise of reuniting them with their deceased loved ones to get them to kill themselves, adding another soul to his count.

The first and most obvious victim is the astrophysicist, Ben. When we first meet him, he is in a deep state of grieving and guilt over his wife’s death. She had invited him to run to the store with her when he was working on a project. He refused and she was hit by a drunk driver and killed while she was out. He had serious survivor’s guilt and felt like there was nothing left for him in this life. He also had no friends and was trying to medicate his pain with alcohol. Over the course of the movie, though, he gradually comes to find community with the small group he winds up thrown in with to deal with the ghost problem. The other members of the group repeatedly encourage him with the reminder that no matter what else happens, they are with him.

With this source of a willing soul blocked, Crump sets his sights on the homeowner’s son, Travis, who, we discover, is still deeply grieving over the loss of his father. That’s the reason they were seeking a new start. His mother was trying to take both of them away from the grief that had been stifling their lives back in New York. Travis is similarly saved by the reminder of the loving community he had with his mother, Ben, and the other members of their little group. By the end of the movie, even the ghosts themselves (who were all victims of Crump and committed to helping the living folks defeat him) had become a community for him.

The nexus points between this film and the Christian worldview are many indeed. Other than the fact that the church exists and one of the characters is pretending to be a priest, God is loudly absent from the film. There are some general references to faith and church communities as broadly positive things, but the Christian worldview does not come into play at all in the story. The folks battling the various spiritual forces are entirely on their own. The fake priest obviously can’t do anything to help, but the implication is that a real one wouldn’t have made any difference either. They needed the help of the mediums and magic spells to make the ghosts go away. And they ultimately wind up saving themselves by their own community. They discover a pathway out of their grief not with hope in some greater future, but in friends and family.

Their solution sounds good, especially in the ears of a culture primed to listen to those kinds of messages, but in reality, it isn’t a solution at all. Not a long-term solution anyway. Throughout the film we meet one character after another who is grieving without hope. Death is a final and permanent separation. Perhaps we will be united again in some ethereal spiritual realm, but that’s about the best we can hope for. Instead, the way out of grief is to focus on this world and the people we have in it. Yet what happens when we lose them? Well, I guess we find other people. And then others. And then others. You see, we really just need to keep some people around all the time. We need a community. Then we’ll be okay.

And while there’s definitely some important truth here, by disconnecting it from its source, what The Haunted Mansion offers us as a path forward out of grief isn’t strong enough to actually do the job. Having a community to lean on when we are going through hard times sounds suspiciously like one of the things Christians have long argued the church is for. I was literally just talking with a friend whose family is going through a hard time yesterday who made the same observation I’ve heard so many times before: I just don’t know how someone goes through something like this without a church family. We were made for community. If we aren’t connected to a church, we’ll find that community elsewhere. Isolation and loneliness really will make us miserable and result in a much harder, shorter life if we let ourselves be consumed by them.

All communities, however, are not created equal. The church is certainly not less than a human community, but it’s also much more than that. It is a community of people called out by Jesus Himself to advance His kingdom into this world. This means the church is not just a natural community, but a spiritual one. It is a spiritual community centered on God who provides the substance and support it needs to become more than it can be if the members were trying to operate on their own. And this divine community is powered not by a vision of something in this world, but beyond that. We run on a vision of a future world where death has been completely removed from the picture and where life lasts forever. This kind of a community with this kind of a vision has the power to give us the hope we need to persevere through grief in ways the world around us simply can’t do.

Our culture is turning away from the Christian worldview and the church more and more completely with each passing day. And yet, for all of its efforts to stand on its own and write its own destiny, the specter of death still looms large over its collective shoulder. Death still claims its victims, and we are left to grieve in their absence. Without the Christian worldview and the church to provide us help and support, though, we are left to grieve on our own, without hope. This is exactly what Paul didn’t want the believers in ancient Thessalonica to face, leading him to write these powerful words.

Grieving without hope is a serious business. And as our culture experiences it more and more frequently, it is desperately trying to find relief. Thus, we have had four major releases from a major studio in four years all dealing with the same subject. It almost seems like that for all their efforts, the people producing these projects can’t find a solution that really works. By trying to copy the Christian worldview and the church but without the divine substance undergirding them, they keep winding up with corrupt and insufficient solutions. Yet instead of returning to the one that works, they just keep looking for others.

Our world is desperate for solutions to the loneliness and despair of the grief that keeps hounding them. This is where the church has an incredible opportunity to do amazing Gospel work. When our world is grieving (and again, after four releases dealing with grief in four years, I think it is safe to say that our world is grieving), we can offer the solution to grief that actually solves the problem. It solves the problem not in making the grief necessarily go away, but by giving us a vision of hope that can sustain us through it. It offers the solution of a promise that we are never alone. We can have Jesus Himself with us, and because death no longer has any power over Him, this means we will indeed never be alone. The Christian worldview offers a hope our world needs and cannot produce on its own. Let’s be sure we are there to offer it when we encounter grief in the world around us. This is just too good of an opportunity to miss.