How Haunted Mansion's Director Captured The Ride's Combination Of Horror And Comedy [Exclusive]

The Haunted Mansion is that rare attraction that both people who adore haunted house rides and those who hate them agree is splendid. It's got lots of creepy atmosphere and some terrific jump scares (the best of which takes place in the stretching art gallery as your journey begins), but it's also got plenty of humorous moments, and Buddy Baker's "Grim Grinning Ghosts" is the perfect tone-setter for the attraction's whimsical sense of horror.

Yours truly even checked an item off their bucket list when I visited Disneyland in time for the ride's seasonal overlay themed after "The Nightmare Before Christmas." With respect to all the Haunted Mansion purists, the addition of Henry Selick and Tim Burton's twisted creations to the Mansion is a perfect marriage in my eye.

You can imagine, then, how pleased I am to see the trailers for Disney's second attempt at turning the ride into a movie, "Haunted Mansion," presenting the film as a near-identical mix of humor and legitimate horror. It's not an easy tonal balance to achieve, as we saw 20 years ago with Disney's original "Haunted Mansion" movie, and it remains to be seen if this new version strikes that blend as well as its marketing does. Working in its favor, this new film comes from director Justin Simien, who excelled at merging wildly different tones and sensibilities in his acclaimed debut feature, the satirical dramedy "Dear White People," if less so in his ambitious horror-comedy follow-up, "Bad Hair."

In an interview for /Film, our own Jeremy Mathai got to pick Simien's brain on all things related to "Haunted Mansion," including how he captured the ride's flawless combination of scares and laughs. To hear Simien tell it, he's just always been drawn to art that achieves that type of duality.

Horror-comedy films have been around since the silent era, although you could argue they really came into prominence with Universal's "Abbott and Costello" monster movie crossovers in the 1940s. It was around the same time that Disney began making animated films like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" and "Pinocchio," themselves fanciful and only somewhat less macabre than the fairy tales that inspired them. As Simien explained, he founds films of this nature comforting growing up Black and queer in the '80s (a particularly scary time to be either of those things):

"I mean, I grew up on that stuff. The first horror movie I saw was 'Nightmare on Elm Street.' I was five years old and I didn't — well, maybe I did turn out kind of weird, but it worked in my favor [laughs]. I think, again, I watched these movies growing up. I watched 'Snow White' and 'Pinocchio,' these movies are terrifying [laughs]. Okay, they are blends of horror and comedy and sweetness and dark and light. As a kid, they make you feel like you can face the darkness of the world. And as a Black gay kid whose dad died, my world growing up was kind of scary. And these movies made me feel like I could get through it."

Because of this, he felt he developed an "instinct" for combining diametrically opposed forms of storytelling. "I don't know how to write drama without being funny and I don't know how to write comedy without being serious. I don't know how to do it. They just live side by side in my brain," Simien explained. It's certainly served him well professionally; hopefully, "Haunted Mansion" will keep his success streak going.

"Haunted Mansion" opens in theaters on July 28, 2023.