Haunted Mansion Director Justin Simien Talks Easter Eggs and Touring the Ride (Exclusive)

Haunted Mansion is hitting theaters next week, and fans of Disney can expect many nods to the iconic Disneyland ride. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with director Justin Simien, and we asked if all of the ride easter eggs were in Katie Dippold’s script. Simien talked about Dippold’s love for the ride, and revealed some of the nods in the movie were inspired by his own tour of the ride… with the lights on! 

“No, not necessarily,” Simien explained when asked about the easter eggs in the script. “I mean, Katie, definitely, Katie Dippold, who wrote the script is the nerd. Okay? She is obsessed with this ride as well, and put a lot into it. But so much of it was like, ‘Well, visually what are you going to do? Are you going to make the mansion look like the one in Disneyland? Are you going to make it just be an amalgamation of all that?’ There was still a lot of choices to make. And for me, having worked at Disneyland and having visited Disney World many times as a kid, what they did is already brilliant. And the thing about a Disney ride, it’s not just a ride, it’s a story. It’s a fully immersive story experience. And to actually be behind the curtain and in the vault and get to see the Bible and get to do a tour of the ride, there’s so much there to be inspired by already.”

Simien continued, “And so for me, it was just like, let’s take what’s here, all of it. Let’s take the conversations they had, the fights between the creators over, ‘Should it be scary? Should it be funny? Let’s make it both.’ Let’s take apart all these things that you think you see on the ride, but let’s look at them and let’s just fill in the blanks and let’s actually lean into the reality of New Orleans and New Orleans at the time when the mansion was built. And all of that is really where the choices come from in the movie.” 

When asked about touring the ride, Simien added, “We got to walk through it and … it’s sad because any dark ride with the lights on, it doesn’t have the same effect. You know what I’m saying? But you get to really see it. And so much of that ride is subconscious. So much of it is stuff [that] is happening on your periphery that you kind of see, but you don’t really, and to actually look at it and be like, ‘Wow, they really, there’s a lot of detail and there’s a lot of thought.’ And everywhere you look there really are secret faces and eyes staring at you, and it has a cumulative effect on you in that ride. And it was just, I’m never going to say it was easy, but it was obvious that that was the first thing we should do. We should literally adapt the story choices they made for this ride into the story choices we make for this movie. I mean, it didn’t have to get complicated. We were working with something really beautiful.”

You can watch part of our interview with Simien at the top of the page.

Is Haunted Mansion Too Scary For Kids?

During our chat with Simien, he revealed Disney was concerned some moments in the upcoming film would be too scary. However, kids in the test audience felt differently. 

“There were some things that the studio thought would be too scary,” Simien revealed. “And then we started to screen the movie and the first folks in, we’d be like, ‘Is the movie too scary?’ Kids would raise their hands like, ‘No, I can handle it. We want more.’ And so eventually there were things that I truly didn’t think were, especially involving the Hat Box Ghost, and especially with some of the jump scares, that I wasn’t sure if it was really going to make it through, but it did because the kids wanted more of it. And I kept saying my first Disney movies, those are still the scariest movies I’ve ever seen. So I talk about Pinocchio becoming a donkey, Snow White getting lost in the forest, these things are terrifying. Like Simba losing Mufasa, these are scary moments.” 

“And kids can handle it. And if you just respect them enough to handle the story, they can do it. And we just leaned into that,” he added. “Life is scary.” 

Haunted Mansion lands in theaters on July 28th.