GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) — I ain’t afraid of no IRB review

Cinema of Cruelty (Movies for Masochists)

The Cultists are back! And in honor of The Resurrection, on this week’s annotated deep-dive, The Cutlists Present Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984). A humble little film of grandiose origins (including a writer born into a family tree of generations of ghost hunters, a un-producable fever dream of a first draft, a 13 month time budget, and a die hard commitment to keeping the SNL and Second City comedy players as the B-plot to the film’s one true core purpose of introducing the doctrine of Spiritualism’s main tenants to the youth of the 1980s), Ghostbusters is one subtle but wild trip.

Notoriously simultaneously a film about everything and nothing, the finished print of Ghostbusters has prevailed through the decades as a largely nostalgic comedy. So much so thusly remembered in the larger cultural zeitgeist that it can be all too easy to overlook just how deeply rooted nearly every line of the script is in esoteric references to over a century of real world Spiritualist practices and lore…

Deep-dives include: The history of parapsychology; J.B. Rhine, Zener cards, the Milgram experiment, and other such ways to gaslight undergraduates in the name of quantitive research; Hittite vs. Sumerian myth (and where our lovable otherworldly gods of Gozer to Zul falls); Dan Akroyd’s real life family business of talking to ghosts; the plight of the EPA; Theosophy and the ethereal vs the etheric; Institutional Review Boards (and the film’s violations therein); Ivo Shandor Revival style cults and the occult appeal of selenium; the film’s myriad folklore references from the 1943 Philadelphia experiment to the Tunguska event; turn of the century cheese cloth regurgitation (or how you get ectoplasm); the film’s offhand references to trepanation, hypnotic dentistry, and menstrual psychosis; the special effects and the unapologetic cocaine-fueled frenzied genesis of everyone’s favorite childhood ghost; and how ultimately this film is, above all else, an esoteric love letter to a new turn of the century Spiritualism.

Episode Safe Word: James Randi