“We’ve all had the experience where you’re sitting in a movie theater, watching the suspense mount, and feeling that tingle start at the base of your spine and slowly crawl up your back until all your hair is standing on end – until, finally, there’s something funny, and you laugh, and it breaks the tension,” says Don Hahn, producer of Walt Disney Pictures’ comedy-thriller, “The Haunted Mansion.” Hahn is one of the most successful producers of animated films in history, seeing through such films as “Beauty and the Beast,” “The Lion King,” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” “With ‘The Haunted Mansion,’ that’s what we’ve tried to capture – something that’s a little bit scary but in a way that’s just pure pleasure.
“It’s a very interesting combination,” Hahn continues. “It’s a little comedy, a little love story, a little scary, a little bit of a murder mystery, all hung on a very strong fairy tale spine. With zombies,” he finishes with a smile.
“This is a story of romance, and mystery, and comedy,” agrees Rob Minkoff, who served as director of “The Lion King” before helming two “Stuart Little” films, “and ghosts – nine hundred ninety-nine of them. But there’s room for one more!”
“As well as the haunted house aspect, there is a fairy tale aspect to the story, a Romeo and Juliet angle,” Minkoff says. “It also has the comic elements of the ghosts and Madame Leota, and the adventure and scares that you have out in the mausoleum and the cemetery. It’s fun to draw from all these different sources and genres and combine them into something new and different that we haven’t seen before.”
“After all,” screenwriter David Berenbaum adds, “ghost stories are about guilt and unresolved issues. Working with Rob and Don, we were always looking for a balance of what would be funny and what would be scary and spooky and mysterious and hopefully we’ve stirred it a good stew.”
“We wanted to do a scary-but-funny movie,” says producer Andrew Gunn. “We felt there had been a lot of straight scary movies lately, really scary movies, but not one that made you jump and also made you laugh – not for a while.”
The key to that turned out to have the right actor lead the audience through the mansion. Funnyman Eddie Murphy read the script, loved it, and quickly agreed to star as Jim Evers, the real estate agent with an unreal problem on his hands. Minkoff and Hahn knew Murphy would be perfect as an ordinary man who suddenly finds himself and his family in an extraordinary situation. “Audiences enjoy seeing him play this kind of role in this kind of movie, a comedy that’s geared to the family,” Minkoff says of the multi-talented actor. Jim Evers was written as a workaholic whose total immersion in his work leads him to neglect his family life; Eddie’s natural likeability and accessibility would help make the character more sympathetic as he is thrust into the incredible and increasingly bizarre environment of the Gracey Manor.
“Eddie is great as the dad – he’s a good dad, but he’s fallen into a common trap, thinking, ‘I have to work hard to give my family all these things,’ when really, what they want is his time. Eddie plays that so well, and makes it sympathetic and endearing,” adds Gunn.
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