‘Haunted Hotel’ Creator Matt Roller Shares the Spooky Secrets of His New Netflix Animated Series

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Everyone loves an old-fashioned haunted house story, but it’s even more enticing when the gloomy lodgings are the centerpiece of a hilarious new adult animated series created by one of TV animation world’s brightest stars.

Conceived by Rick and Morty veteran Matt Roller, Haunted Hotel materializes on Netflix this fall with its spirited tale of a single mom who inherits a spooky Gothic inn named the Undervale, which incidentally comes complete with a menagerie of undead, unhappy spirits. Along with the ghost of her deceased brother and two precocious kids, this reluctant innkeeper must try to work with these phantom inhabitants to manage a successful hotel for sleepy overnight guests.

“I think the deep origin [story] is that I’ve always loved horror,” Roller tells Animation Magazine. “There’s the obvious references in Haunted Hotel, but for the deeper cuts as well, I watch all of it. When I was at Rick and Morty some eight years ago, I had a lot of ideas for horror-based episodes. Today that would be pretty normal for Rick and Morty, but back in Season 2, that show was more sci-fi focused. It got me thinking that I would like to make my own comedy vehicle that allows me to mine horror for comedy instead of sci-fi. Then I just pulled from inspirations in my life, growing up in New England, knowing about the old creepy hotels you see at the beach and upstate New York. Just trying to make a world that’s compact and scary but also expansive.”

Animated Apparitions

With its refreshingly appealing animation by Titmouse (Digman!; Love, Death + Robots; Star Trek: Lower Decks), gag-rich plotlines and esoteric humor, this delightfully demented show is also blessed with a stellar voice cast that includes the talents of Will Forte, Eliza Coupe, Skyler Gisondo, Natalie Palamides and Jimmi Simpson.

Roller serves as Haunted Hotel’s showrunner and executive produces alongside Chris McKenna (Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man: Far From Home), Dan Harmon (Rick and Morty, Community) and Steve Levy (Rick and Morty, Community), with Erica Hayes (Rick and Morty, Carol & the End of the World) as supervising director.

“We went into this with the idea that adult animation has a little bit of a silo to it,” Roller explains. “Kids’ animation can look incredibly wacky. In adult animation, there are boundaries to what the characters have to look like, and if they go outside those boundaries, you risk people thinking that it’s for kids. On top of that, I also wanted it to look like its own universe. I didn’t want our characters to look like they hopped over from Rick and Morty or Digman! or Bob’s Burgers. We wanted realistic proportions so they’d be relatable and human, so our monsters would be scarier. We tried pushing some of their proportions with our art director, Robbie Erwin. So their arms are a little longer, we went with irises, which are less common; I know Big Mouth does them, but a lot of other shows don’t. We found places in the margins to push and pull our characters to make them pop and feel distinct within our world.”

Though Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion attraction, Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters and TV’s live-action sitcom Ghosts might come to mind as subtle influences for the project, Roller says that his favorite visual reference for Haunted Hotel’s interior was director Ti West’s The Innkeepers.

“The other thing I’m really happy about is our backgrounds, that we pushed a little bit more,” he says. “We were trying to evoke the tactile nature of an old hotel — the creaky floors, the worn floorboards and slightly peeling wallpaper. [We] wanted to capture all that in this place. Because unlike a Rick and Morty, where every episode you’re going to another planet, in our show, home base is always going to be the hotel and the hotel is, in a way, infinite. Because we can always find another room that, on a certain night, leads you somewhere else. But we wanted the hotel to feel really detailed and lived-in, and [like] a place you would want to go [to] even if it’s scary.”

Roller scored a coup with his vocal cast, landing actors who are all engaged and invested in the fun material, and the chemistry they conjured up is remarkable when considering the recording process.

“There’s so many aspects to this world that make telling jokes in it very easy. Not that it’s the point of the series, we’re trying to honor the horror genre, but I counted upwards of 80 visual Easter eggs in the show!”

— Series creator Matt Roller

“We came together for a few table reads, but other than that they were separate records,” he mentions. “I tried to make sure people had an awareness of the other records to know what they were playing off of. And it helps that they’re all incredibly talented actors. I had a notion For [characters] Nathan and Catherine in casting, but back when I first wrote it, I was writing Abaddon as Jimmi Simpson as a McPoyle from Always Sunny [also played by Simpson], just that kind of sweaty confidence was what I wanted for this demon character. It would have been easy to make this little boy demon either have a monster voice or a little kid voice. I thought both of those things would be predictable and limit the comedy. Instead, we just have Jimmi Simpson just being Jimmi, who’s a tremendous comedic actor.”

For a seasoned animation pro like Roller who has a wicked sense of humor and is unafraid to wield it, Haunted Hotel and its collection of vulnerable main characters, both living and not-living, was a playground to immerse himself in.

“There are dozens of other stories that I’d love to do in this world. Some of it comes from my sitcom training, coming from Community and Rick and Morty, which are so joke-dense,” he says. “Archer is an influence too. Then on top of that, we have this fun genre to play in. So, you constantly have games you can play. You can angle on a ghost. You can angle on a monster. You can focus on the hotel of it all or the family of it all. There’s so many aspects to this world that make telling jokes in it very easy. Not that it’s the point of the series, we’re trying to honor the horror genre, but I counted upwards of 80 visual Easter eggs in the show. At the top of the slasher episode, when the kids are on the dock by the lake, that dock is modeled after the one in Friday the 13th. It’s subtle and it doesn’t matter, but we did it anyway because that’s a reference for us and it’s a great one.”

Ghostly Visions

The accomplished team at Titmouse forged a fantastic working relationship with Roller that allowed him to enjoy every single step of Haunted Hotel’s inventive enterprise.

“The vizdev process took us through the summer and a little of the fall of 2023,” he adds. “We had lots of great artists come in, and everyone threw in something that became foundational to the show. But we landed on Robbie Erwin, who brought everything home, alongside supervising director Erica Hayes. When it came time to animate, we brought in Titmouse Vancouver, and that’s been awesome because it’s all in-house Titmouse and everyone’s on the same page.

“I’ve been on a lot of animated shows, and because of the nature of writers’ rooms and how they wrap before production does, I’ve never been in the process of creating an animated show from start to finish, so there’s been discovery for me here as well. I wrote the pilot eight years ago, and it sold two other times, and each time I got the rights back and finally brought it to Netflix where it got made. It’s been a dream come true. I love this show and I love writing it.”

You can check in to Netflix’s Haunted Hotel (Season 1: eight episodes) on Friday, September 19.