Matt Roller Talks ‘Haunted Hotel,’ Hidden Details for Horror Fans & Creating a Crossover Experience (VIDEO)

The mashup of horror and animation is a long-standing tradition that stretches back almost 50 years, to the days when five teens and their Great Dane solved mysteries in a green van and groovy ghoulies rocked out with teenage witches.

Over the years, the blending of cartoon aesthetics with horror hijinks has created an enduring tradition, if not a little on the campy side. What began as lightweight scares for kids has steadily evolved into something darker and far more fascinating, with adult animation embracing horror and comedy to create something new. The genre has shifted from mystery-solving teens and goofy ghouls to twisted tales that embrace both the grotesque and the hilarious, pushing the limits of what animation can depict and proving that cartoons aren’t just for kids anymore.

Showrunner Matt Roller continues the trajectory of the toon evolution with Netflix’s Haunted Hotel. The story follows single mom Katherine (Eliza Coupe), who attempts to transform a haunted hotel into a thriving business after inheriting the “scare B’n’B” from her late (but still very present) brother Nathan (Will Forte). She’s joined by her two kids, Ben and Esther (Skyler Gisondo and Natalie Palamides), as well as her adopted child, Abaddon (Jimmi Simpson), a demon trapped in the body of a child from the 1700s. Together, the family navigates spectral guests, ghostly shenanigans, and the occasional serial killer while attempting to turn the Undervale Hotel into a home.

Roller, who previously served as a co-executive producer on Dan Harmon‘s Krapopolis and as a writer on Son of Zorn, Rick and Morty, and Archer, has crafted not just a bold animated outing that Fangoria fans would enjoy, but a full celebration of the horror fandom itself. Every corner of the Undervale Hotel is packed with references for eagle-eyed viewers, making the series as much a treasure hunt for genre devotees as it is a story of spectral chaos.

Matt Roller sat down with TV Insider to talk about his undertakings with the Undervale, his love of all things spooky, and who should check out Haunted Hotel (hint: everyone).

When did you first get the idea for the Undervale?

Matt Roller: Back when I was working on Season 2 of Rick and Morty… That’s not when I wrote it exactly, but it was a short time after that [when] I started digging in on the script.

I loved working on Rick and Morty, and I loved the wild stories we could tell there, but it was very sci-fi focused, and my passion has always been in the horror space. And so I wanted to create a horror version of Rick and Morty.

And that didn’t mean, like one-to-one, just swap out everyone and put them in a horror setting, but it was kind of the genesis of the idea because I had a lot of horror movies that I wanted to riff on instead of sci-fi movies. So I set out to create a world that I could just play in forever.

What inspired the premise of Haunted Hotel?

I guess it came from two things. It came from wanting a world where I could just play in the horror genre. I wanted as big a sandbox as possible. So that’s why a haunted hotel felt like a good spot to start. You know, like we can have some 40 rooms in this place, so conceivably, 100 episodes in there could still be places we haven’t seen.

Then there are the woods outside, the lake, and the cliffs — we can always establish something that allows us to play however we want to. And that’s half the game.

I think the other origin was having relationships in the story that I cared about. Obviously, the core one is between Katherine and Nathan — the living woman and her dead ghost brother. This sort of second chance, they have to form a relationship and learn from each other, and just be close in a way that they weren’t in life.

I thought that was really interesting, in a way that we can always dig deep if we want to, and touch on the harder aspects of that. But it’s also just a family comedy. We can also just be light with it, and it’s the kids now have a surrogate father figure, and he’s trying to figure out what goals he conceivably achieve for the rest of his afterlife, [like] if he’s locked to this property, and it just felt like a way to tell relatable stories that haven’t been told before.

The Funky Phantom, The Groovie Goolies, Scooby-Doo, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy… There is a long tradition of blending horror with humor to create kooky cartoons. Which ones inspired you in the creation of Haunted Hotel, and where do you see your show fitting within that lineage?

I’m definitely inspired by Scooby-Doo, which is a funny sentence to say. I think what I like about it is that the characters, for all the wacky hijinks, are on the grounded side of things, and the stakes are real.

I think something I wanted to do in this show was not have people be killed willy-nilly, or have huge, disastrous things happen that you couldn’t conceivably walk back. So I guess I took lessons as well from family sitcoms, live-action ones where, however insane things get, it needs to be believable that by the end of the episode, everyone would be okay, and they could keep running this hotel.

We don’t really murder a guest for no reason because in my mind, that would mean the cops would come and very quickly, this whole thing would unravel. So I think I was drawing some inspiration too, from some of the family sitcoms that I’ve worked on.

Do you have to be a horror aficionado to appreciate Haunted Hotel? And if not, would you consider this gateway horror?

We took a lot of care in this to make it more of a comedy about horror, rather than a horror comedy. You don’t need any horror knowledge to watch this and enjoy it, but if you do have horror knowledge, you’re going to understand some of the references.

I think maybe if you watch the slasher episode [Episode 3, “Randy Slasher”] and if you’re curious what we’re pulling from, and so you go watch Halloween or Friday the 13th. The second episode [“Unfinished Business”] has some pretty obvious references to The Ritual, which is an awesome horror movie I love. There are so many horror references in this.

I would love for people to go watch the movies that inspired the stories.

You’ve said that this is a love letter to horror fans. What should they look out for while watching Haunted Hotel?

There are somewhere abover 80 easter eggs in the show. And they get pretty deep cuts. For example, do you know the bayonets in The Orphanage? I do.

I really wanted — and I’m not saying this is an iconic part of the movie — but I wanted some element of that building in the hotel, and above the front door in The Orphanage, there’s a really cool stained glass arc, and we had that at the front of the hotel for the longest time, and then it didn’t work with like, the geography we’re trying to establish. So what I did instead, among other things, was the wallpaper in that very impactful closet [scene], which again, was not something you see for long…we put that wallpaper in the hotel in a few different places.

When they’re in the outside wood shed, at one point, you can just see a bunch of tools around, but if you look more specifically, you’d see there’s a sledgehammer, there’s a scythe, there’s a machete, it’s the iconic killing tools from a number of horror villains. The tools themselves, singularly, would not [standout]…but [when] we put it next to all the other ones, maybe you notice.

I guess I would challenge people to find the Easter eggs. Some of them are pretty obvious, like shot references, and a bunch of the background wall art… because a hotel just has to be full of art. It would have been easy to make it just a bunch of landscapes.

Whenever we had time and could, we tried to be more specific. Something we did a lot of was put horror buildings in the background,  like the Amityville house, and Michael Myers’ house as art on the wall…

There’s a lot of furniture in the hotel from horror movies, which is not interesting, and people may not even notice, but why not be specific? Instead of a generic couch in our parlor, we put the couch [for Ti West‘s The House of the Devil]. And there’s a lot of that. I just re-watched all the horror movies I liked, and pulled furniture, curtains, and wallpaper from them, and gave those to our artists as suggestions for ways to populate our world and make it richer and just more specific to the genre.

And do you think that there is a huge crossover between people who enjoy horror and people who enjoy animation?

I hope there is, because this show exists, and I think there’s some evidence of that in Gravity Falls, Dead End, Paranormal Park… obviously, Scooby-Doo, we’re probably the more the recent one that is going at it most directly, and embracing horror and actual horror movies, rather than just like horror as like a theme or a genre.

If Haunted Hotel ran long enough to define a generation, what would you hope for fans to say is its place in animation history?

I think it would be nice to be an iconic horror comedy. I think the show leads with empathy. I think all the characters are pretty expressive about who they are. It’s not a nihilistic show. People share their vulnerabilities and are not mocked for them. We play it for comedy. Ben is very open about the fact that he’s bullied, but he also worries about his bully, and I think that’s just such an interesting perspective for that guy to have.

So I think having a horror show that, in a weird way, has a kindness to it, as opposed to a cynicism and killing people for no reason. I think that tone is something I’m really happy about. I hope people notice, even if they don’t know what they’re noticing.

Haunted Hotel, Season 1, September 19, Netflix