#‘Haunted Mansion’: How VFX Brought Classic Ghosts to the Big Screen

In creating Disney’s new movie Haunted Mansion, members of the visual effects team took walks through the iconic Haunted Mansion ride for inspiration. In the ride, which first opened in 1969 at Disneyland, guests walk through the gate and into the Mansion before being guided into “Doom Buggies” in which they ride through the haunted house and meet many ghosts along the way.

Of course, this was conceived at a time before CG and other digital tricks became a familiar part of venue-based entertainment. But capturing the ride’s familiar look and feel was part of the goal of the VFX team, led by production VFX supervisor Edwin Rivera, who also works for vendor DNEG. Along with with Industrial Light & Magic and Opsis, the team completed the movie’s nearly 2,000 VFX shots. “It’s always fun to bring to life something iconic from people’s childhood,” Rivera tells The Hollywood Reporter.

In 1969, the ghosts that appear in the ride were created with a clever, low-tech method know as a Pepper’s Ghost, which is effectively a 2D illusion created with reflections and named after John Henry Pepper, who used this projection approach for entertainment during the 1800s. More recently, the technique re-entered entertainment landscape when it was used to put performers on a live stage, notably when the late Tupac Shakur “appeared” at the 2012 Coachella Festival. The appearance was frequently billed as a hologram, though it was not.

To come up with the technique used in the movie, Rivera and director Justin Simien explored many approaches that Hollywood has used to create ghosts, and then formulated a recipe that they felt was right for their apparitions.

“We didn’t actually use the Peppers Ghost effect, but we did look to see what the ultimate effect was,” Rivera says of the work on the movie. “When you’re on the ride, it’s not like it’s CG. But it feels like it’s see through. They inspired us as to how to make [actors playing the ghosts] feel like they’re both there and not there, both physical and ephemeral at the same time.”

Simien wanted real actors playing the ghosts in full costumes and makeup to be on the set during filming. “There was a more grounded feel to it,” Rivera says, adding that they then used an approach he describes as “ectoplasmic effervescence.” He elaborates, “when your hand is sitting in a bioluminescent algae, when you’re not moving it, nothing’s really happening. But as you move it, you start to see that the agitation lights up these particles. [Similarly] as these ghosts move through space, they create these ghost-like particles. And then another layer was a transparency to the body that [also] revealed this decrepit skeleton underneath in any area that they were shadowed.”

To do this, the team used witness cameras during filming in order to get the coordinates of the actors playing ghosts in costumes and makeup. “We then created CG scans of their bodies to use as the generation point for the particles,” Rivera says, “and then we made sure that we did clean passes of every single scene so that we could reveal what was behind the actors at any given time.

“We had the best of both worlds,” Rivera sums up. “We had an actor that was actually there, but then this kind of other element that made them feel like they were not of this world.”