Horror crosses over into many genres, but rarely—if ever—does it find its home in a sitcom. The forthcoming, adult animated series Haunted Hotel sets out to change that.
The Netflix show’s basic premise hits a traditional note. Middle-aged Nathan dies and leaves his hotel to his younger sister, Katherine, a single mom with two kids just trying to make ends meet. Where it veers out of classic sitcom territory is that while Nathan is dead, he’s not gone. Nor are any of the many other dead people who once stayed at the Undervale Hotel. But this abundance of ghost guests is an entertaining side menu. The main course is family dynamics.
“I was on Rick and Morty a decade ago,” says the show’s creator Matt Roller, noting how that series uses sci-fi as a jumping-off point for interesting stories. “I wanted to build my own family show that could live a little more in the horror space.”
“Matt provided us with a few documents up front,” says Supervising Director Erica Hayes. “This included lists of his favorite horror films, beginning with his top three: The Conjuring, The Orphanage, and The Shining. “Visually those were my inspirations,” says Roller.
As he set out to create a show with emotion and empathy that viewers could enjoy without caring about horror, he also sought familiar elements that would appeal to horror lovers, like the Gothic mansion with its creaking floorboards and peeling wallpaper. It’s the kind of place that isn’t completely off-putting, but it’s rundown enough that you only check in because every other hotel in town is full.
Another way to appeal to horror fans was to play with tropes, like slasher, cult-themed, and supernatural. “That’s what’s fun about the show,” Hayes says. “No episode feels exactly the same.” Art Director Robbie Erwin explains that lighting was a crucial part of making every episode feel different. “[It’s about] finding those moments where we can push lighting and texture in a place that concentrates our focus on the comedy or the horror,” he says. “Finding ways where we can convey endearing moments, contrasted by a horror moment, and have those beats shine on their own and still work cohesively together.”
Storyboarding was another area that required exploration to find the right balance. Hayes and Erwin had also worked on Rick and Morty, and Hayes says that when she started boarding, it was in the style of that show. “For dialogue scenes—very sit-commy, flat shots, two shots, things like that,” she says.
She explains that Rick and Morty has a lot of cuts, and the characters talk quickly. “That’s just the language I was used to,” she says. “I really had to pull that back for this show because Matt wanted to live in the conversations and the dialogue a little bit longer in each shot.”
“One thing that I think we were both tackling at the same time, coming from shows with punchy comedy pacing, [was] having the courage to let a shot linger,” says Roller. “[This is] not something you really do in a lot of comedy. You don’t hold on to something for no reason. But in horror sometimes you [have to] because that’s what evokes the tone.” He explains that it scared him creatively to experiment with timing like this because “why are we just holding when nothing’s happening. It felt weird to do that.”
These kinds of decisions were ways to bring a richness to the show. But emotional texture also came from how they worked to connect viewers to the characters’ humanity. They chose to treat the horrors as if they were real, Roller says. In other words: “We don’t treat death lightly.” In fact, few deaths take place because they didn’t want an episode where, for example, a monster kills a group of kids, and then at the end of the episode the characters reset to who they were at the start. “That’s a totally legitimate path,” says Roller, but he wanted his characters to be stronger at the end of the episodes. If they are constantly experiencing deaths around them, that’s hard to pull off. Instead, the team created perilous situations where the characters manage to avoid the threat and grow through the experience.
As for the ghosts and other creatures with laugh-inducing names like Stabby Paul and Angela the Hallway Shrieker, they get a lighter touch. Along with being comic relief, they’re used strategically to develop the family dynamic. “Let’s say a demon comes into the hotel and is storming through the hallways,” says Roller. “Katherine, the mom, would say, we need to find a way to get this thing out of our hotel. Nathan, her ghost brother, would say, let’s hear him out, this demon is probably more scared of us than we are of him. The daughter, Esther, who’s kind of a scamp, would want to know if the demon could give her power in some way. Ben, the insecure older brother, would worry that he did something to summon the demon.”
Watching each character’s point of view crash against the other’s—all while they’re trying to keep the hotel afloat amidst ghost havoc—is what Roller believes is the joy of each episode. Hayes adds that having ghosts as part of their day-to-day life, bothersome but ultimately familiar, allows the space that’s needed to explore the family’s relationships, and this ultimately is what creates the heart of the show.
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