Merrick here...
Guillermo Del Toro sat down with MTV for a quick chat - their discussion turned to his recently announced moviefication of Disney's Haunted Mansion ride.
"The storyline for 'The Haunted Mansion' and the ride is quite open," he explained. "We are taking sort of the core mythology that you can tap into and saying that there are many mansions around the world and they're all part of a sort of web. The spider sitting at the center of the web is what the fans of 'The Haunted Mansion' would know by the nickname the Hatbox Ghost, which is a beautiful creature that was created but there's a legend that it was discarded on the first day of the ride's operation because it was too scary. I like that legend, but the reality is that the imagineers could not make the illusion work, so they took it out. It's more or less where the bride is in the attic on the way out of the mansion, but it's such a great character that there is literally a cult for the Hatbox Ghost amongst hardcore 'Haunted Mansion' fanatics, and I'm one of them."
...says Guillermo HERE.
Among other interesting tidbits he discussed? He says that, for this film, he's envisioning a complete world with a "heightened reality" - one that's "super designed. I.e. not just a "haunted mansion" in a regular world. Could be quite interesting. Here's an embed of the entire discussion:
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