About the Movie
Three parapsychologists — wisecracking Peter Venkman, true believer Ray Stantz and deadpan Egon Spengler — lose their university funding just as New York’s ghosts stop being theoretical. So they do the American thing: mortgage a childhood home, buy a derelict firehouse and a dying ambulance, and go into business as the city’s first paranormal exterminators. Business is slow, then the EPA shuts down their containment unit at exactly the wrong moment, and client Dana Barrett’s refrigerator turns out to contain a demigod heralding Gozer the Gozerian, an ancient god who intends to end the world and is polite enough to let the Ghostbusters choose the form of the destroyer.
Ivan Reitman directs a script by stars Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis that plays its science fiction completely straight underneath the jokes — the proton packs, traps and containment grid all obey rules the film establishes and pays off. Bill Murray’s Venkman became the defining comic performance of the decade, Sigourney Weaver grounds the supernatural plot, and Rick Moranis, Annie Potts and Ernie Hudson complete an ensemble with no weak seats. It was the biggest comedy ever made at the time, and it still plays like it.
Why This Movie Matters to Sci-Fi
Ghostbusters fused two genres that had rarely met — the effects-driven sci-fi blockbuster and the character comedy — and showed each could make the other bigger. Its world of franchisable ghost removal, municipal red tape and blue-collar scientists treated the fantastic as a trade, an approach to the supernatural that countless films, shows and games have borrowed since. The hardware alone entered the permanent iconography of pop culture, and the film’s balance of genuine spookiness and laughter remains the standard every horror-comedy is measured against.
Where to Watch
Watch on YouTube (rent or buy) via YouTube Movies & TV.
