Creator Matt Roller welcomes you to Haunted Hotel, starring Will Forte and executive produced by Dan Harmon. The adult animated series — with laughs and scares — premieres Friday September 19th on Netflix. (This Animation Scoop Q&A was edited for length and clarity.)

Jackson Murphy: I always feel like when it comes to hotels there’s always this suspense and mystery about what’s happened at hotels over decades and generations. Have you always been fascinated with that?

Matt Roller: Oh yeah. I love a hotel as a venue for a spooky story, as you say, because of all the people who have been there and might still be there. I also love the angles of the buildings. Hotels are full of these long hallways that intersect with other hallways, and especially if you’re in an older hotel, sometimes it’s a weird intersection. You’re getting these cross pathways where you’re walking down them at night and anything could pop out anywhere. Lends a lot to the imagination in terms of storytelling and spooking you out.

JM: For sure… and movies like “The Shining”. I wanted to ask you about design inspiration with creating The Undervale — how it all looks. What went into that? How much did you study to prep for all of this?

MR: Great question. We spent a lot of time thinking about the scale of the hotel and what it should look like. And in terms of scale, we knew we didn’t want just a small, three-room B&B because no long hallways. And also it felt like it would limit the storytelling eventually, because if you only have three rooms, you can check those rooms quickly. We wanted a space big enough that there could be something upstairs and you’re not sure where it is. But that also meant with our family of four or five running this thing, we couldn’t do The Overlook. You couldn’t have a 200-room hotel because how are they maintaining this thing? It’s crazy. So we kind of dialed in this 30 to 40 room hotel, something that felt possibly manageable, even though it would be tough. And then we started dialing in the look of the hotel, and I knew I didn’t want it to look super “Addams Family” gothic… decaying. It needed to look like it could be a functional business, just a bad one. So we wanted to look like a grand building that had seen better days, and that was kind of the goal from the outside. We made everything a little bit decayed. We kept the design asymmetrical. We kind of set up some windows so that if we want to, there are some things that could look like a face, just giving ourselves dramatic possibilities in the way we shoot it.

And then when we got inside, our artists were great and we paid a lot of attention to colors and textures and continuity in this space. “Haunted Hotel” is a show where we’re gonna spend so much time in the hotel, and we want it to feel real and lived in and… the hallways continue to exist when you’re not there. We made our own floor plan so that we know where we are in the building, even if the audience doesn’t exactly. And then we put a lot of work into the floorboards and making them look worn, and the wallpaper being a little different between rooms and maybe torn in places, just to give the feeling that this place has been fixed and renovated over the years, and no one’s ever had the money to do a full job. So it’s really been kind of a piecemeal thing. Hopefully that makes the building feel real and a place that you want to go.

JM: Yeah. All those details really come through. This could be one of the most popular Netflix series where people pause all the time to look at the details, to see all of that frame by frame. Katherine is a single mom of two who’s running The Undervale with her ghost brother Nathan. How did you wanna show the adult sibling relationship under this unique circumstance?

MR: I thought it was a really interesting opportunity to explore a second chance at a brother-sister relationship. There’s the finality of… he’s a ghost. They can’t really do a lot together anymore unless it’s in this hotel. And I thought that was a really interesting lock in for Katherine and her family because there’s a realistic version of her that would just bail on this place. But if she were to bail, she’s leaving her brother there because he can’t leave. So it’s kind of an opportunity to start a business and restart a relationship in a way that maybe they didn’t in life. So on the one hand, it’s a fraught brother sister relationship, which we’ve seen before, but what’s new about it is that one of them is dead. So there’s a real different sense of the relationship than some brother sister stories I’ve seen.

JM: And you also have in the same shots… the living and the dead. And I feel like that had to be very interesting for you and your animation team to take the perspective of those shots. What were some of the more interesting aspects of that?

MR: We had a lot of early discussions about how we wanted to portray the ghosts, and there was some talk about putting an aura on them, making them semi-transparent. And ultimately we landed on a practical reason to make them just look almost like everyone else, which is: if Nathan looked like a ghost, if he was transparent or something, every time a human came into the hotel, or a side character, they would be saying, “Oh no, it’s a ghost!” And we’d have to have the same conversation over and over and over again. So what we landed on is that ghosts, until they walk through something or until you see the knife in their back, just look like a living person. And the exception we made to that rule is that ghosts don’t have shadows. If you look at their feet, they don’t have shadows. And that was a little concession we made that felt interesting. We also tried… maybe light doesn’t affect them. Maybe there’s not a gleam in their eye. Or maybe when light hits them, it doesn’t affect them like other characters. And we found that that just looked like an error. So we went with the technically incongruous version where light can hit them like everyone else, but they don’t throw a shadow.

JM: You’ve worked on a number of adult animated shows recently — “Krapopolis”, “Archer”, “Agent Elvis”, which was wild, and “Rick and Morty”. And you’ve worked with Dan Harmon, who’s an executive producer on this. How has he been a mentor to you as far as going from a writer to now a creator of an animated series? That inspiration and that guidance.

MR: Dan is my foundation, and I would hate to say that to his face. Dan taught me so much, maybe the majority, of what I know about kind of good methodical storytelling. He has his kind of story circle approach that I think fans of the genre are familiar with. But I think what he imparted in me the most was not accepting the first story idea that comes along is perfect.

JM: And what were your conversations amongst the entire team about the gore that you wanted to display on this show? Horror has been so hot in movies and television over the last couple years. How far did you wanna go with… the blood and guts that we see on “Haunted Hotel”?

MR: I think we found a middle ground. I personally wasn’t that interested in gratuitous gore because I think there’s a lot of shows that do that really well. And I think with our animation style and the stories we’re telling, it both wasn’t necessary and it might limit some of our audience because I think these episodes are great for teens and, dare I say, kids. They’re mostly family stories with… the family rising to the challenge and facing adversity against a genre specific horror threat, most of the time we didn’t need gore to tell our story. And… I didn’t wanna create a world where we were killing people every episode because I wanted to keep our human characters grounded. And if they run a hotel where every week, five, 10 people are disappearing… why isn’t Episode Two a bunch of cops showing up?

JM: (laughs) So what do you think hotel workers are gonna think about this show? What do you want them to get from this experience?

MR: “Finally, someone tells my story!” I think it would be creepy working in a hotel, working at the front desk late at night. That inspired a lot of this. It’s not a job I would want. So maybe they will feel like their truth is being told through these stories.

JM: In these funny ways and through dialogue from Will Forte, who has some of the best timing, comedically, of anybody in the business. And you got to see that firsthand.

MR: Yeah, Will is great. Our entire cast is great. Everyone feels like they are a version of their character, which made it really fun and surprisingly easy. They’re just all pros, so they can just do whatever you need.

JM: So when you go to hotels now in the future… are you gonna be looking for ghosts?

MR: I’m gonna be looking for ghosts. I’m gonna be looking for ideas. I have seen a ghost. I was at a hotel in New Orleans where I woke up in the middle of the night and I saw kind of a three dimensional black shadow on the wall, just across from the bed, 10 feet from me. I was awake enough to try to parse what it was. I was looking for light sources in the room that could throw a shadow. I turned on my phone flashlight and showed it in the corner, and it disappeared. But when I put the phone away, the shadow was there again, and it started to drift toward the bed. I could not parse what I was looking at, and I finally just said, “Okay!” out loud and went back to bed because what, what are you gonna do?

JM: You just accepted it. You just accepted it for what it was.

MR: I accepted that there was a ghost in the room, and it was there first. I do think ghosts are real. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know if they’re people, but I do think there’s things.