Happy Death Day and Freaky director Christopher Landon’s Amblin-style family adventure We Have a Ghost premieres on Netflix on February 24.
Written and directed by Landon, We Have a Ghost is an adaptation of a story written by Geoff Manaugh, published on Vice in October of that year.
In the film, “Finding a ghost named Ernest haunting their new home turns Kevin’s family into overnight social media sensations. But when Kevin and Ernest go rogue to investigate the mystery of Ernest’s past, they become a target of the CIA.”
We Have a Ghost stars Jahi Di’Allo Winston (Charm City Kings) as Kevin and David Harbour (Violent Night, “Stranger Things”) as the ghostly Ernest. Ahead of the film’s premiere, Bloody Disgusting spoke with Harbour about what it’s like to portray a nonspeaking ghost and what keeps him returning to the genre.
Harbour may have a recognizable voice, but his character, Ernest, doesn’t speak beyond ghostly moans and groans. That required the actor to develop characterization through nonverbal means.
Harbour explains, “It was something where I thought initially it would make my job so much easier because you don’t have to learn any lines. All my friends joked about it, like, ‘Oh, it’s going to be such an easy part for you. You don’t have to learn any lines.’ Then I found it so much more difficult than having scenes where you have lines because you have to come up with all this behavior and what you want to reveal at certain times, and it’s a lot of responsibility to make those scenes work.
“It was intimidating, but ultimately, it was very exciting, and I’m proud of what Chris Landon was able to create with us; and certainly what Jahi and I were able to create between us. It was very special for me.“
We Have A Ghost. (L to R) Isabella Russo as Joy, Jahi Winston as Kevin, Christopher Landon (Director), David Harbour as Ernest on the set of We Have A Ghost. Cr. Scott Saltzman/Netflix © 2022.
How did this unique character evolve during Harbour’s process?
The actor recalls, “When I began thinking about it, and then when Chris [Landon] and I started talking- even things like the hairpiece came and the bowling shirt- it all came out of an idea that the movie has an E.T. quality to it. There’s this alien presence, kind of, at the center that wants to go home. But he’s very alien. I thought a lot about what would be alien to this society. A lot of the movie deals with technology, TikTok, and Instagram, and they’re going viral and trying to make money on it. There’s a lot of kinetic energy, but the family disintegrated as a result of that. I think Ernest’s real need for family is something that [Kevin] and his dad see, and that’s what moves them to understand a little more about what we’ve lost in life.”
Harbour continues, “I wanted him to be a real product of a different world and time. Chris and I discussed how to do that and made him this guy. Also, some things would come up where I thought to myself, ‘wouldn’t it be cool if he had this quality of a scary old guy in a house with a comb-over and the whole thing?’ You’d see him, and originally, he’s staring at you. You think of all these movies like Insidious. There’s always some old creepy woman or guy who’s around, going to kill the kids, and I wanted him to have that quality, but then to see that he’s three-dimensional. All of that was a process as we went into it, and it all developed further as we went.”
We Have A Ghost. (L to R) Erica Ash as Melanie, David Harbour as Ernest in We Have A Ghost. Courtesy of Netflix © 2022.
Between “Stranger Things,” Hellboy, Violent Night, and now We Have a Ghost, David Harbour is on a genre hot streak. It turns out that Harbour wasn’t necessarily a horror fan when he set out in acting, but his work has honed his love of the genre.
He tells BD, “That is something that attracts me to it, initially certainly attracted me a lot, and as I’ve gone on, I’ve become more of a fan of the horror genre in many different ways. But initially, I came into this business as a real true art movie geek, kind of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams and doing these plays, even heady Brecht and crazy stuff. I approach all these characters with a lot of that intellectualism and a lot of that context. Then as I’ve gone on, I’ve fallen more and more in love with the genre stuff. Yeah, I started approaching it from, as you would say, the heart place or a conceptual place, and as I’ve gone on, it is what I like to see in movies. I like to see genre stuff. I like to see sci-fi, horror, and even comic books. Our modern version of Shakespeare, in a sense. It’s like our modern mythologies are expressed this way, and I’m here for it.“
We Have a Ghost touches on the toll social media can have on a family, highlighting something the genre does so well: reflect the current social climate with a heightened sense of reality.
Harbour reflects on why the genre is so successful at this, “First of all, I do think it’s the only place where you can have social commentary because you can have racism be expressed as an alien creature in a world like that. You see Blomkamp’s District 9; you’re dealing with incredible social commentary there. Also, I think there is something within us that desires a mythical experience. I mean, our lives are somewhat mythic. The fact that we can conceive of our own death is a pretty crazy thing for a creature to walk around with. I think that we’re all striving for this transcendence. Comic book heroes, or even the horror genre, overcoming a monster contain this transcendent experience. I certainly like it, and I think a lot of people do.”
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