2010
07.28

haunted_mansion

Guillermo del Toro is bringing Disney’s Haunted Mansion attraction to the big screen. But, don’t expect the man behind Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy to produce just another family franchise. After announcing the project—which he will write and produce—at Comic-Con last week, del Toro revealed that his vision for The Haunted Mansion film is terrifying and completely different than Disney’s 2003 effort starring Eddie Murphy.

“We are not returning Eddie Murphy’s calls,” del Toro quipped to convention attendees.

del Toro further explains to MTV:

The movie I see in my head of ‘Haunted Mansion’ is not what I believe anyone is imagining it would be. It’s not just a regular world with a haunted mansion plopped in the middle.

I’m really thinking of a movie with a heightened reality, which is super designed, incredibly innovative, narratively and visually.

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.

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.

When people think of ‘The Haunted Mansion,’ they think they know [what it’s about]. But I really want to push a lot of stuff that they have not seen ever.

Hmm. I’ll believe it when I see the R-rating.

Also on the horizon for del Toro is his and director Troy Nixey’s remake of the 1973 made-for-TV creature-feature Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, starring Katie Holmes, and Guy Pearce. The film arrives in theaters on Jan. 21.

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