Ghostbusters is one of my all-time favorite films, and was probably the first to bring science to a supernatural scene outside of exposing a Scooby-Doo style hoax.
This movie brought pure pseudoscience to a normally solely magical occupation: ghosts and the dead.
It’s also uproariously funny.
Symbolism
The ghostly adversaries in Ghostbusters are honestly unlike many other ghosts in fiction.
Many times, Ghosts are used as the souls of the recently deceased. Other times, they are echoes of what once was. Here, the echoes are so distorted that they are barely human at all. The ghosts here are twisted, deformed and almost totally inhuman aside from their obsession. The little green blob known as “Slimer” is the best example of this sort off deformation
Slimer is little more or less than gluttony. It eats and drinks, but can never be sated. So, it continues to consume even as the meals pass right through its body.
Later ‘ghosts’ that appear all seem to be extreme expression of emotions. The only exceptions being the three beasts that are not ghosts or human at all: Vinz Clortho (The Key Master), Zuul (the Gate Keeper) and Gozer the Gozerian. They are more extra-dimensional spiritual beings. True “Other” things that command these ghosts.
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| Gozer the Gozerian (aka Gozer the Destructor, Volguus Zildrohar, and Lord of the Sebouillia) |
They represent forces beyond normal control, especially Gozer, who defies genera explanation or identities.
“I thought Gozer was a man.”
“It’s whatever it wants to be.”
Ghosts don’t have that luxury, assuming only vaguely humanoid forms related to their obsessions and so on.
Ghostbusters 2 introduced Mood Slime, which has its own symbolic value as it is literally compressed emotions from the entirety of New York City (and thus, full of bad mojo). This is a belief found a lot in eastern religions, but rarely seen in the west: people’s negative feeling seeping into the world and creating monsters, bringing a new level of metaphor to the ghosts. The mood slime is literally psychic pollution: emotional effluvia in desperate need of flushing.
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| (From left) Dr. Stantz, Mr. Zeddemore, Dr. Venkman and Dr. Spengler examine a sample of the mood slime. |
Just imagine other large population centers having similar build ups of the stuff. Perhaps Ghostbusters should get some more offices around the world.
Biology
As creatures of spirit, the ghosts do not really have any biology, but there are some universalities among them.
Most of the information about ghosts for Ghostbusters was drawn from Dan Aykroyd’s Father’s cases as a paranormal investigator as well as the Spiritualist movement of the turn of the 20th century.
As such, the ghosts are composed primarily of ectoplasm.
Ectoplasm is an ill-defined substance created by spirit mediums which was composed of various things (as they were one by one exposed as frauds). The universal constant of the substance was that it was used by spirits to interact with the world, though itself was something of a nebulous liquid/gas/jelly thing.
Whenever you see a bed sheet style ghost, it is due to the influence of ectoplasm. The spirit appears within the shroud of ectoplasm as a general form. Think of it like an image within silly putty, but a bit more three dimensional.
The Ghosts are able to pass through normal matter—something that in science is only a function of neutrinos, which are small enough to pass through most other matter by virtue of their being so small. I could speculate that ectoplasm is made up of them primarily, but they don’t quite behave like neutrinos beyond that. They share that attribute, but little else.
Ghosts, as stated, appear to derive from extreme emotions, a point hammered in with the introduction of Mood Slime in Ghostbusters 2.
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| Zeddemore and Stantz covered in mood slime. |
That directly linked and created a vector for emotions to create “psycho-kinetic energy”. Literally, it is power from emotions. That’s what ghosts seem to run on, and the slime itself is seen creating horrors either of lingering things around an emotional being or just whole cloth creations.
I find that a lot of magic and ghosts operate on the basic principles set up in Ghostbusters, which makes sense as one of its sources (Spiritualism) was a grand syncretic form (a belief system combining many already established ones) combining many magical traditions from around the world.
It’s also generic enough to be applied across the board, from the lowest sprite even to over-deities.
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| “We’re ready to believe you…” |
