‘Haunted Hotel’ Checks In on Netflix, Uniting ‘Rick and Morty’ Talent for a New Animated Horror-Comedy

Netflix today premieres Haunted Hotel, a new adult animated series that blends horror, comedy, and family drama. The series arrives with a significant creative pedigree, developed by a team of writers and producers known for their work on culturally impactful shows such as Rick and Morty and Community. The 10-episode first season introduces a unique premise centered on the operational challenges of managing a hospitality business for the permanently checked-in, promising a distinct new entry in the landscape of contemporary animation.

A Spirited Premise: Family, Business, and the Permanently Checked-In

The narrative foundation of Haunted Hotel is built upon a confluence of personal crisis and supernatural circumstance. The story centers on Katherine, a recently divorced single mother who, in search of a fresh start, inherits the Undervale Hotel from her late and estranged brother, Nathan. Relocating with her two children, Ben and Esther, she discovers that the inheritance is far more complicated than a simple deed of property. The hotel is not merely old; it is intensely haunted, and her deceased brother is now one of its many spectral residents.

This inciting incident establishes the series’ core conflicts, weaving together the emotional threads of grief and sibling reconnection with the practical, and often chaotic, demands of entrepreneurship in a paranormal environment. The family’s attempt to operate a functional business is perpetually undermined and complicated by their otherworldly tenants, creating a unique narrative framework that explores the mundane realities of coexisting with the macabre.

The series is anchored by the living Freeling family and their ghostly relative, each navigating the hotel’s strange reality from a different perspective.

Katherine (voiced by Eliza Coupe) serves as the protagonist and the audience’s entry point into the chaos. As a struggling single mother, she is tasked with the dual burdens of raising her children while attempting to transform a dilapidated, ghoul-infested property into a viable source of income. Her character embodies the central struggle of imposing order on a world defined by supernatural anarchy.Nathan (voiced by Will Forte) is Katherine’s brother, whose recent death and subsequent haunting of the hotel sets the plot in motion. Described as good-natured, he functions as a crucial intermediary between the living and the dead. He attempts to assist his sister in running the business, leveraging his unique position among the spirits, though his judgment is often swayed by the questionable ideas of his fellow phantoms. This dynamic allows for an unconventional exploration of a sibling relationship forced to mend its fractures across the mortal coil.Ben (voiced by Skyler Gisondo) is Katherine’s eldest child. Characterized as socially awkward, he represents the desire for normalcy within the family. His attempts to maintain a typical teenage life in the face of constant paranormal disruptions provide a grounded, relatable counterpoint to the hotel’s pervasive strangeness.Esther (voiced by Natalie Palamides) is the younger daughter. In direct contrast to her brother, she is described as quirky and dark, readily embracing the bizarre new environment. Her fascination with the hotel’s supernatural elements positions her as a character who thrives in the chaos her mother and brother seek to manage.

Beyond the central family, the Undervale Hotel is populated by a vast and varied cast of non-living guests and staff.

Abaddon (voiced by Jimmi Simpson) is a prominent supernatural character who is not a member of the family. He is described as an immortal child from the 1700s whose body is possessed by the soul of a demon. This character’s presence immediately signals the series’ willingness to engage with darker and more irreverent comedic themes, moving beyond simple ghosts to include more complex mythological and demonic elements.The Broader Ghostly Population of the hotel is extensive, featuring what are described as “high-maintenance guests who will never check out”. This large ensemble includes a wide array of spirits, ghouls, and monsters, from axe murderers to specters from various historical eras, providing a rich canvas for episodic storytelling and the parody of numerous horror tropes.

The series’ premise establishes a unique narrative engine. The convergence of a family drama, a workplace sitcom, and a horror anthology is held together by a crucial constraint: Katherine and her children cannot simply abandon the hotel. The property represents not only their sole financial prospect but, more significantly, their only remaining connection to Nathan, who is physically bound to the location. This narrative lock-in forces the living characters to actively engage with the supernatural elements rather than merely react to them as external threats. The horror is not something to be survived and escaped; it is something to be managed. This framework effectively domesticates the paranormal, transforming epic threats into mundane operational hurdles. A serial killer’s ghost becomes a customer service issue; a doomsday cult is a problematic group booking. The comedy and drama are thus derived from the inherent friction between the supernatural stakes and the everyday, bureaucratic struggles of a working single mother trying to keep a business afloat.

The Creative Architects: A Proven Assembly of Talent

The creative leadership behind Haunted Hotel represents a formidable and cohesive team, largely drawn from a specific and influential school of television comedy. The series is spearheaded by individuals whose collective résumés suggest a clear and deliberate comedic sensibility.

Creator and Showrunner Matt Roller is the central creative force of the series. His extensive experience includes writing for acclaimed animated comedies like Rick and Morty and Archer, live-action sitcoms such as Community and The Goldbergs, and serving as a co-executive producer on Dan Harmon’s Krapopolis. This diverse background demonstrates a proficiency in crafting fast-paced, structurally inventive, and reference-heavy comedy that can operate successfully in both animated and live-action formats.The Executive Production Team is composed of a core group of collaborators with a long history of working together on culturally significant projects.Dan Harmon, co-creator of Rick and Morty and creator of Community, serves as an executive producer. His involvement signals a likely focus on high-concept narrative structures and the deconstruction of genre conventions. His productions are famously underpinned by a narrative framework he developed called the “Story Circle,” an eight-step model adapted from Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, or hero’s journey. The structure dictates that a character begins in a zone of comfort, desires something, enters an unfamiliar situation, adapts, gets what they wanted, pays a heavy price, returns to their familiar situation, and is ultimately changed by the experience. This codified approach to storytelling, which Harmon has described as being “tattooed on my brain,” is a key component of the creative DNA he brings to his projects, ensuring a reliable and coherent narrative engine focused on character transformation.Chris McKenna, a key writer and executive producer on Community, also executive produces. His work extends to major blockbuster films, including co-writing Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man: Far From Home, and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle. McKenna’s experience indicates an ability to blend intricate comedic plotting with emotionally resonant character arcs and large-scale spectacle.Steve Levy, another veteran producer from Rick and Morty and Community, rounds out this core group, further cementing the shared creative DNA of the project.Supervising Director Erica Hayes brings a distinct visual and performance-focused expertise to the series. Her directorial work on Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites, combined with her experience as a storyboard artist on shows like BoJack Horseman, highlights her skill in translating sharp comedic writing into nuanced animated performance. With a background in sequential art, Hayes has expressed a preference for directing “acting-heavy” scenes, suggesting a commitment to capturing genuine character emotion and subtext within the animation, a crucial element for a series that balances horror with family drama.

The assembly of this particular team is not merely a collection of successful individuals but rather a strategic replication of a proven creative ecosystem. The leadership of Haunted Hotel represents a near-complete transplantation of the creative nucleus from Dan Harmon’s influential body of work, encompassing the creator, key executive producers, the supervising director, and even one of the composers. This pre-existing synergy and shared comedic language suggest an efficient and creatively aligned production process. For Netflix, the series appears to be a strategic investment not just in a single concept, but in a reliable “production model” known for delivering a specific brand of intelligent, meta-textual, and character-focused adult animation that has consistently resonated with both critics and audiences.

Inhabiting the Haunt: A Voice Cast of Comedic Specialists

The series’ tone and characterizations are brought to life by a principal voice cast composed of actors with extensive backgrounds in comedy and a proven ability to portray distinctive and memorable characters. The casting choices appear deliberate, aligning each actor’s established persona with the specific demands of their role.

Will Forte as Nathan: Known for his eight-season tenure on Saturday Night Live, where he created numerous bizarre and iconic characters like MacGruber, and for his Emmy-nominated lead role in The Last Man on Earth. Forte has built a career on portraying characters who blend absurdity and eccentricity with an undercurrent of pathos and sweetness. This skill set is well-suited for Nathan, a “good-natured” ghost whose well-intentioned efforts to help his family are often misguided.Eliza Coupe as Katherine: Acclaimed for her roles as the intense and driven Jane Kerkovich-Williams in Happy Endings and the cynical Dr. Denise Mahoney in Scrubs. Coupe has established a strong comedic persona playing intelligent, high-strung, and hyper-competent characters who are frequently overwhelmed by the incompetence and chaos surrounding them. This archetype is a direct fit for Katherine, the single mother attempting to impose logic and order on the supernatural pandemonium of the Undervale Hotel.Skyler Gisondo as Ben: A versatile young actor with notable roles in the comedy Booksmart, the horror-comedy Santa Clarita Diet, and the dark comedy The Righteous Gemstones. Gisondo often portrays earnest, relatable, and slightly awkward young men, making him a natural choice to voice Ben, the teenage son who serves as a grounded anchor of normalcy for the audience amidst the hotel’s absurdity.Natalie Palamides as Esther: A comedian, writer, and voice actor known for her physically demanding and absurdist one-woman shows, such as the award-winning Nate, and for voicing the iconic character Buttercup in the 2016 reboot of The Powerpuff Girls. Her background in avant-garde performance and clowning suggests that her character, the “quirky and dark” Esther, will be a primary source of the show’s more surreal and unpredictable humor.Jimmi Simpson as Abaddon: A prolific character actor recognized for his memorable and often unsettling roles in series like Westworld, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and Black Mirror. Simpson has a reputation for portraying intense, intelligent, and quirky characters who often possess a sinister edge. This makes him an ideal choice to voice Abaddon, a demon inhabiting the body of an immortal child, a role that requires a blend of creepiness and dark comedy.

Designing the Macabre: Animation, Atmosphere, and Auditory Cues

The world of Haunted Hotel is defined by a series of deliberate artistic and technical choices that create a distinct atmosphere and visual language. The execution of the series’ animation, production design, and musical score are integral to its storytelling.

Animation by Titmouse, Inc.: The series is animated by the award-winning independent studio Titmouse, Inc. The studio’s extensive and varied portfolio includes such notable projects as Big Mouth, The Venture Bros., Metalocalypse, and Star Trek: Lower Decks. Known for its artist-driven approach, “boundless creativity,” and its ability to execute a wide range of dynamic visual styles, Titmouse’s involvement suggests a high standard of quality and creative fidelity for the animation of Haunted Hotel.Production Design of the Undervale Hotel: The primary setting is conceived as more than a simple backdrop. Creator Matt Roller has articulated a specific aesthetic vision for the hotel, intended to support the narrative’s core themes. It is designed not as a stereotypical gothic or “Addams Family”-style mansion, but as a once-grand establishment that could plausibly function as a business, albeit a failing one. The architecture is intentionally asymmetrical, and the interiors are detailed with worn textures, mismatched and torn wallpaper, and aged floorboards. This visual state of decay and incomplete renovation serves as a constant visual metaphor for the Fisher family’s own precarious financial and emotional situation. Furthermore, the backgrounds are intentionally rendered with a high level of detail, populated with numerous “horror easter eggs” designed to reward attentive viewers and fans of the genre.The Visual Language of the Supernatural: The series employs a specific and consistent visual rule for its spectral characters. To circumvent the narrative problem of characters repeatedly reacting with shock to the sight of a ghost, the spirits are animated to appear solid and tangible, almost indistinguishable from the living. The key visual differentiator is subtle: the ghosts cast no shadows. This elegant solution establishes a clear visual language for the show’s supernatural elements that trusts the audience’s observational skills.The Musical Score: The auditory landscape of the series is crafted by a collaborative team with deep connections to the show’s executive producers.Ryan Elder, the primary composer for Rick and Morty and Harmontown, co-scores the series. His involvement further solidifies the show’s link to the Harmon creative ecosystem and suggests a musical style capable of navigating sharp tonal shifts between horror atmospherics, precise comedic punctuation, and moments of genuine emotion.Joshua Moshier, an Emmy-nominated composer, joins Elder. Moshier’s work on the FX series Baskets and Warner Bros. Animation’s Looney Tunes Cartoons demonstrates his expertise in scoring projects that blend offbeat comedy with pathos, as well as his proficiency in the dynamic, action-oriented scoring required for classic animation. His background suggests a capacity for grounding even the most surreal scenarios in genuine peril or emotion.

These aesthetic and technical decisions are not merely stylistic flourishes; they are fundamental to the show’s narrative and thematic ambitions. In a series set almost entirely within a single location, that location must function as a character in its own right. The detailed, “decayed but functional” design of the Undervale Hotel provides a form of passive storytelling, constantly reinforcing the family’s state of being: holding on, but just barely. The inclusion of dense background details and the subtle visual rule for the ghosts create an immersive and re-watchable world that respects the viewer’s intelligence and attention to detail.

A New Niche in Supernatural Comedy: Genre Deconstruction and Market Positioning

Haunted Hotel enters a television landscape where the concept of a supernatural sitcom has already found mainstream success. However, a closer examination of its genre, tone, and narrative focus reveals a deliberate strategy to occupy a distinct and specific niche within this subgenre.

The series identifies itself primarily as a horror-comedy, with an emphasis on the former. It is described as a “love letter to horror” that actively “riffs on horror” tropes, indicating a satirical and deconstructive approach to the genre. The episodic plots are reportedly focused less on the personal histories and relationships of the ghosts and more on the living family’s encounters with a variety of horror-specific threats, such as gremlins, doomsday cults, and serial killers. This positions the series as a work of genre parody, aimed at an audience with a pre-existing literacy in horror conventions.

Tonally, the series carves out a unique space. Despite its “adult animation” classification and the creative team’s association with more mature content, Haunted Hotel carries a TV-14 rating. The humor is described as “earnest” rather than “edgy,” with an absence of profanity. This choice distinguishes it from more cynical or profane contemporaries in adult animation and suggests an intention to reach a broader, though still mature, audience. This earnest tone is further supported by an underlying thematic focus on meditations on grief and family, adding a layer of emotional depth to the comedic horror.

The most immediate point of comparison for Haunted Hotel is the successful live-action CBS sitcom Ghosts. Both series share a nearly identical foundational premise: a family or couple inherits a large, haunted property with the intention of converting it into a hospitality business. However, beyond this surface-level similarity, the two shows diverge significantly in their execution, narrative focus, and genre allegiance.

Medium and Scale: The most obvious difference is the medium. As an animated series, Haunted Hotel has the freedom to depict a virtually unlimited number of ghosts and more visually spectacular or surreal supernatural events without the constraints of a live-action budget. In contrast, Ghosts is built around a core, manageable ensemble of eight principal spirits.Narrative Focus: This difference in scale directly influences the narrative focus. Haunted Hotel utilizes its large spectral population primarily as a backdrop and a source for horror-genre parody, with the central story remaining focused on the living family’s attempts to manage these threats. Ghosts, conversely, is fundamentally an ensemble character comedy about the ghosts themselves. Their individual backstories, interpersonal relationships, and personal growth are the primary engines of its plot and humor.Genre Allegiance: The two shows ultimately belong to different genres. Haunted Hotel is a horror-comedy that uses its premise to satirize the mechanics and tropes of the horror genre. Ghosts is a workplace sitcom where the “workplace” happens to be haunted. Its comedic roots lie in character interaction and situational humor, not in genre deconstruction.

Through these distinctions, Haunted Hotel engages in a sophisticated act of market positioning. It leverages the audience’s familiarity with the successful premise of Ghosts as a point of entry but delivers a fundamentally different product. It is not a direct competitor but a re-contextualization of a popular concept, shifting the focus from character-driven sitcom to high-concept, animated genre satire. This strategy allows it to coexist with its live-action counterpart by appealing to a more specific, genre-savvy viewer who is interested not just in the comedic potential of ghosts, but in a playful and intelligent deconstruction of the horror genre itself. The series is available for streaming globally on Netflix as of September 19, 2025.