The Haunted Mansion Director Explains Why the Hatbox Ghost Was Chosen as the Film’s Main Villain

If you only watched Disney’s new Haunted Mansion movie, and never went on either version of the classic ride, you may think that the Hatbox Ghost is a major part of the attraction’s story. Jared Leto’s character is the film’s main antagonist, but that’s not actually the case when it comes to the Haunted Mansion attractions. The Haunted Mansion in Disneyland removed the Hatbox Ghost animatronic from the ride shortly after it opened in 1969, and didn’t add him back until 2015. Walt Disney World’s version of the attraction will be adding the Hatbox Ghost for the very first time next month. So how did the Hatbox Ghost become the central villain of the Haunted Mansion movie?

ComicBook.com spoke to director Justin Simien ahead of Haunted Mansion‘s 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD debut on Tuesday morning, and we asked him about his version of the Hatbox Ghost. He explained that the character was originally a much smaller part of the story.

“It’s funny, that part was figured out before I got there, but it was a much smaller role,” Simien told us. “It felt more like Poltergeist, where there is this evil ghost character, but you don’t really know much about its motivations or really even its personalities. You know it’s bad and you got to run. And as we developed the movie, the studio is very involved in that process. I always felt like it was my job to keep steering everybody back to the ride. So if we had a question mark, if we didn’t know what to do here or there, ‘Let’s go back to the ride. What’s the ride got going on?’ You know what I mean? And let’s pull from something that, because I love building worlds, and something happens quite often where you fall onto these coincidences that feel like they were planned all along, but they weren’t. It’s just that you were circling the same drain a little bit. 

“And whenever I saw one of those happened, I got really excited about it and it was like, ‘Oh my God. See, we can make this thing finally make sense.’ It was just like a detail that was interesting before, but now we can actually actually loop it into the plot and make it feel like it was planted there all along. So I don’t know. I think that maybe comes from that process. Certainly the Hatbox Ghost role expanded quite a bit as we made the movie, and especially once Jared Leto was cast, and I wanted that all to just feel united and wholesome, and it made logical sense. ‘Oh, of course, this is how we would do this. This is why this was there all along.’ That was my goal anyway.”

Longtime fans of the Haunted Mansion attraction have helped make the Hatbox Ghost popular over the years, despite the fact that he hasn’t been featured in the rides for very long. Simien went on to say that the love the fans had for the character is why it made so much sense to feature him in a prominent role.

“There were these images, these framed pictures of him around, and people just over the years became obsessed with him and he crept into the canon, and you always got to pay attention to stuff like that in fandom because that’s where the magic always happens,” the director explained. “Three’s always a creative intention, but then when the audiences get ahold of it and they start to pick apart things and hone on things, it’s the excitement about him being a character actually preceded him being a character the way we understand him.”

Haunted Mansion is now available on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital HD. The film is also streaming on Disney+.