‘We Have a Ghost’ Director Christopher Landon Previews His Supernatural Gateway Movie [Interview]

Up next from Happy Death Day and Freaky director Christopher Landon is the Amblin-style family adventure We Have a Ghost, debuting on Netflix on February 24, 2023.

In the film, “Finding a ghost named Ernest (David Harbour) haunting their new home turns Kevin’s family into overnight social media sensations. But when Kevin (Jahi Di’Allo Winston) and Ernest go rogue to investigate the mystery of Ernest’s past, they become a target of the CIA.”

Written and directed by Landon, We Have a Ghost is an adaptation of a story written by Geoff Manaugh and published on Vice in October of that year. Manaugh’s story was titled Ernest, billed as a “socially mediated ghost story.”

Bloody Disgusting spoke with Landon ahead of We Have a Ghost’s Netflix premiere. The filmmaker provided insight into his formative gateway horror movies, how his silent ghost evolved, and the challenges of building an intense car chase sequence around an incorporeal entity.

We Have a Ghost puts family at the forefront of this ghost adventure, with hallmarks to many classic gateway horror movies of our youth. It begs the question of what movies shaped Landon’s love of the genre. If it wasn’t already apparent, Landon’s answer reinforces his championing of gateway horror.

He tells us, “Oh, God. There’s a bunch. But look, Gremlins was a big one. The Frighteners was later, but there’s a little bit of the Peter Jackson vibes going on. I go back to Tremors all the time; still obsessed with that movie. But also Beetlejuice. There’s some Tim Burton; there’s some Amblin. It’s all over the place. Because even Spielberg understood that scaring, being afraid as a kid, is such a human emotion, it’s such a human experience. The beginning of E.T. still had that kind of vibe like, ‘What is in the shed? What is it?'”

Landon’s work consistently puts characters and character development at the forefront of his stories, from Happy Death Day to Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones.

The filmmaker explains his approach to writing, “I really do try to approach everything with as much empathy as possible. I think that I immediately recognize myself as a deeply flawed human being and that we all are. That we’re all a bit messy and that we’re all trying to figure out our way through life and how we fit into the world. I always try to treat my characters with that kind of respect and give them the freedom to be who they are. Because I do believe that the more that people can recognize themselves in your characters, the more connected they’re going to be to them. So that’s where I try to write from.”

That also extends to his new movie’s ghost, Ernest. Landon details how he wanted to set Ernest apart from other cinematic ghosts, including the character’s lack of speaking. 

“I started with that I knew I wanted Ernest to feel like he’s made of some kind of energy and that he can interact with his environment,” Landon explains. “Not only how objects move through him or how he moves through an object but also how he interacts specifically with light. There’s a moment in the film where he’s walking through the attic and passes a shaft of sunlight. You get to see how that light interacts with his being. That was something that we focused on because what I had seen in prior films was a lot of washed-out transparency, and that was it. I felt like we could create a lot more texture and still preserve the performance but still make him feel special without it being distracting. That was the balance. That’s what I was looking for.”

Landon continues, “When I started writing, he was a silent character. And then, at one point, the studio panicked. This was another studio, not Netflix. They said, ‘He needs to talk. He should talk. It’s going to be too weird.’ So, I tried to get him to speak through an old Speak & Spell. But then I was like, ‘Oh, my God. That’s going to drive me crazy.’ It’s also betraying what I wanted for him in the movie, so I went back to silent Ernest. I wanted Kevin and Ernest to have to connect on a deeper level and that they wouldn’t have the advantage of conversation to do it. They needed to feel a kinship because of their situations. That felt honest to me, and so that was where I went with it. But yeah, it was challenging. David [Harbour] had the hardest role in the movie by a mile, and I knew he was the guy to pull it off.“

We Have a Ghost packs in the adventure, including a thrilling car chase sequence, but the production challenges were compounded by including a ghost that can move through physical objects, like cars. Any scenes involving Ernest required shooting the same setup in four different ways.

Landon expanded on the challenges, “Then you can add grueling New Orleans summer to that as well, humidity and lightning. It was very, very, very, very challenging. It took an enormous amount of planning. Again, I was very fortunate to have an excellent team around me to help me through that because it was really challenging. But yeah, it was the combination of you’re doing crazy stuff, crashing cars, and there’s shit flying everywhere. Then you have an actor who you have to shoot four times every time. It just added what would normally take, let’s say, if it was a 5-day thing, it becomes a 15-day thing. You know what I mean? You have to do so much more than you normally would, even in that kind of a set piece. But it was also really fun and exciting to shoot it at the same time. We had a blast.”

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