Matt Roller opens the doors to “Haunted Hotel”

Photo Courtesy of Netflix

At Harvard University, Matt Roller was the funny guy on his mock trial team. His college extracurriculars laid the seeds for a career built on writing jokes. That would have to wait, though, as Roller’s first job out of college wasn’t in film or in television; he started out as a consultant, following in the footsteps of his classmates in law and business.

“About two weeks into that job, I realized I'd made a huge mistake, and that everything I liked about my college activities was the humor aspect … I kept the job, but I started looking for ways to pivot into entertainment,” Roller told The Panther. “And at the time, it wasn't obvious to me that that would be TV and movie writing … I started doing stand-up and improv and writing spec scripts of existing shows like “30 Rock” and “Modern Family.”

Pragmatic optimism is how Roller described his attitude towards navigating a burgeoning career in film and television as a writer, a blend of hope and initiative. Roller’s outlets to hone his writing skills were both on the page and via tweet. 

“I wasn't coasting and waiting for something to come to me. I would write a pilot, and I would submit it to whatever I could. And then my next step wasn't to refine that pilot again,” Roller said. “I would put it away and write another one, right? And I was always writing … I was making myself write six jokes a day to try to get better at that.”

Roller’s aims had an expiration date: if he hadn’t hacked it as a writer by the time he was 30, he was planning on going back to grad school. Fortunately, soon after he relocated to Los Angeles to be closer to the industry he sought to break into, he wrote a contest-winning pilot that got him the management that helped land his first job in television as a staff writer for the much-admired sitcom “Community.” This experience got him his next writing gig on “Rick and Morty” and introduced him to a number of frequent collaborators whom he’s worked with on “Haunted Hotel,” including executive producer Dan Harmon.

“Haunted Hotel,” which Roller created, wrote and executive produced, sees a dysfunctional family unit attempting to run a hotel full of ghost residents called The Undervale. Katherine is a single mom to her two kids and a conduit to the world of the living for her brother, who guides her through running the establishment and opens her eyes to the paranormal world around her.

The genesis of the show occurred to Roller while he was working on the second season of “Rick and Morty.” The first bit of horror that resonated, albeit negatively, with Roller was when he wandered into a viewing of the original “Nightmare on Elm Street” and saw the unsightly acts of Freddy Krueger.

“I'd never seen anything close to that before, and I was horrified, and it scared me off of horror until my mid-20s… It's funny to now be spending so much time in a horror-based show when I really didn't get back into it until my mid-20s, and at that point, (I) really leaned in and now I watch everything,” Roller said.

He’d seen the potential in blending horror and humor in works with the zombie comedy “Shaun of the Dead.” As he leaped into the depths of sci-fi concepts on “Rick and Morty,” he wondered what would happen if you took that show’s tone and humor and applied it to the horror genre.

“And that's when I really started thinking about what world would allow that and that's kind of where I started. It wasn't so much, ‘what is a story I want to tell,’ as ‘what's a world I could make that would let me tell 100 horror stories in any type of horror I wanted,’” Roller said. “And that's how I started with a haunted hotel, and then a family in it, because those all felt like (the) lowest common denominators of a lot of horror … And I started crafting the relationships from there that would allow me to kind of do whatever I wanted without limits.”

Roller did attempt to diverge the show from the path “Rick and Morty” had taken in certain ways from the beginning. 

“Rick and Morty is a somewhat nihilistic show. And I think that works because sci-fi could be nihilistic … you can go into sci-fi with the perspective that we're just dust in an infinite multiverse, we are insignificant,” Roller said. “I happen to think in horror, it's almost the opposite, because even when you're facing terrors, the moral of a lot of the stories is (that) everything matters … There's no such thing as a small choice. And I think that's an interesting perspective, both for horror and for her characters who care about each other.”

Roller further elaborated on what distinguishes “Haunted Hotel” from the show it indirectly spawned from.

“This is not a nihilistic show at all. I think it's a life-affirming show about people being stronger together. And I think the characters in the show are vulnerable with each other. And I think vulnerability is funny. There are a lot of jokes around people admitting what they're scared of,” Roller said.

As a showrunner, Roller had to build out a writers' room, a full circle moment a decade and a half after he joined the staff of  “Community,” to help develop the show and figure out who he wanted to collaborate with in devising it. He strived to gather a range of perspectives and experiences within his staff 

“You want people at every level of experience so that they can contribute different things to the job,” Roller said. “You want people who had weird jobs and grew up in different places, because they'll have a backpack full of characters (and) people that they grew up with, who will be different from the people that you grew up with. Because, yeah, everyone is different.”

Roller had to craft a motel that could credibly fit the parameters of the show, aesthetically and narratively. It had to have long, unsettling corridors and house as many ghosts as the show throws at you. Working in animation allowed Roller to insert easter eggs wherever he wished throughout the hotel to all of his horror inspirations from “Shaun of the Dead” to “The Curse of Monkey Island,” a game from the late ‘90s that Roller played in middle school. 

Roller couldn’t help but praise the voice cast that’s been assembled for the show (“I keep calling people pros, but they all are”), a who's who of comedic talent like Will Forte and voice acting legends like Keith David. Forte plays Katherine’s brother in the show and Roller loved working with him.

“There are ways that (the) character could kind of seem dumb, and I think the way he portrays it is not dumb. It's earnest and optimistic. He sees the best in people, and sometimes that gets the better of him,” Roller said. “He has some songs he sings in the show, we had one or two wild songs, and he listened to my scratch version two or three times … and just went right into it, which is very fun to watch. He's got a folksiness, and it makes it fun.”

One of the residents under Katherine’s roof and by far, the most wacky is Abaddon, a centuries-old demon trapped in the body of a young boy from the eighteenth century.

“I liked the idea of an all-powerful demon getting trapped in a little boy and suddenly facing their own impotence and scampering about the property, ruining things for everyone else. It just felt like a good vehicle for comedy. And from the reaction so far, I think he's a hit,” Roller said.

Roller’s most crucial bit of advice for aspiring creatives, particularly in television and animation, involved both reading habits and impulses towards writing.

“You (have) got to read a ton … From a writing perspective, the piece of advice I give everyone is don't keep reworking the first thing you do,” Roller said. “Move on to thing number two and then thing number three, because you'll learn so much more from breaking thing number two than you will from round ten of your first thing … You've got to just keep going.”

All episodes of “Haunted Hotel” are streaming now on Netflix.