Ghostbusters Movie Ghosts as of 2024

Written by Jonathan Wojcik

Ghostbusters was a big, big part of my childhood, but it's ultimately not something I've really kept invested in; not only am I fairly fatigued by endless spinoffs, reboots, sequels and adaptations of every media brand out there, but this is one franchise that's never really re-embraced what actually captured my imagination back in the day, which was of course all the super-weird "ghosts" floating around the cartoon show and toy line. There have, however, been two entire new movies since the last time I really talked about anything Ghostbusters related, and some of the new ghosts aren't half bad at all; even if they're very, very few and far between.

MUNCHER

Can you believe I never talked about Muncher yet? I guess you can if you're familiar enough with this site, because I like to be able to review multiple creature designs together, from the same source, and for no explicable reason, 2021's Ghostbusters: Afterlife decided to introduce only a single new entity, filling the rest of the film with rehashes and cameos that I had so little interest in, I didn't even watch the film until it was the only thing left to watch on an airplane. This is really too bad, because their single new offering was still a pretty solid one. Muncher might come off, at first glance, as an imitation of Slimer. He's very much in line with the same aesthetic, a blobby and wrinkly little wad of a creature with vaguely humanlike features, and he even fills a similar narrative role as something just freaky enough for our protagonists face off against in their first complete on-screen ghost hunt. Muncher and Slimer are even both defined by their appetites, so they could almost be canonically "related" in some sort of supernatural, taxonomic sense, both along the lines of a "hungry ghost" manifesting from a dead guy's greed or gluttony.

Muncher, however, has a few fun gimmicks that really set him apart from his green cousin. For one, Muncher only eats metal, which is always a fun creature gimmick. He's also a lazier, more mild-mannered sort of creature as long as he's left alone, having no interests beyond liesurely eating his way through an old run down factory, but piss him off enough and he can become dangerously violent. It's the tried-and-true gimmick of a creature with big, monstrous jaws behind its innocent facade, which is a lot of fun in tandem with the metal-eating hook. He can even also spit his stomach contents back up as a defense mechanism with considerable force, which is pretty damn threatening when those stomach contents are mangled hunks of half-chewed steel.

The coolest thing about Muncher is, however, the fact that he has the body of a giant tardigrade, an animal only recently adored by the general public. Artist Brynn Metheney went through so many different concepts, I might as well devote some other article to reviewing prototypical Munchers alone, but when director Jason Reitman became fascinated by water bears, it rubbed off on the rest of the crew and finally on Muncher's evolution. This is purely for the sake of a fun visual, of course, but you can't help wondering if it actually means anything in-universe. Some concept art even suggests Muncher is the spirit of a rich old man who actually owned the smog-belching foundry he now haunts. If that's still the case, why might his soul have taken the shape of these microscopic arthropods?

MINIPUFTS

Reviewing these in order of appearance, I have mixed feelings about the "Mini Pufts." The original giant, supernatural Stay-puft was simply the form taken by The Destructor as it drew from the memories of Ray Stanz, a one-off incarnation of an entity that returns to destroy civilization every so many thousands of years. But in Afterlife, the forces of Gozer are still attempting to invade our world decades later, and one result of this are hordes of tiny, mischief-making marshmallow men that come alive from bags of Stay-Puft brand marshmallows wherever they're exposed to high enough concentrations of spiritual energy.

These beings, like the storyline that births them, feel like uninspired callbacks and a shamelessly formulaic cash-grab, turning one of the franchise's most famous symbols into marketable little Minions-esque critters that can keep coming back indefinitely in Ghostbusters media until the heat death of the universe.

On the other hand, they were already doing this when I was a kid, coming up with any contrived reason they could think of for the living, malevolent supermarket mascot to reappear in cartoons, video games and comics despite the highly circumstantial reason it ever existed at all. If this was going to keep happening anyway, it may as well be given one definitive justification, and the "minis" are about as interesting a solution as that ever could have been. The Destructor was supposed to Destruct us, and it was unnaturally prevented from doing so when the Ghostbusters "crossed the streams" and blew its Earthly vessel to smithereens. So what's "left" of the Destructor, weakened and fractured, is still attempting to trickle back into our world and finish the job, but can only manage these pathetic incarnations of the form Ray essentially shackled it to.

If you forced me to come up with a way to keep bringing Stay Puft back, I honestly couldn't have done better. What they represent from a corporate perspective is tiresome, but in a vacuum as new Ghostbusters lore, I guess I accept the Mini-pufts as an interesting expansion of Destructor lore.

THE HELL'S KITCHEN SEWER DRAGON

The first new ghost of 2024's Frozen Empire, I really like the Urban Legend vibe of this one's complete name and title. It's a transparent blue, serpentine creature strongly resembling a deep sea eel, which is always a nice choice, with a visible skeleton through its gelatinous surface. It's nothing as ambitiously strange as a lot of other ghosts in the setting, but it's cool, stylish and fits in well alongside creatures like the Subway Ghost from the original film, which was said to be the springboard for its design process. Solid effort and respectable execution.

BONESY

In Frozen Empire, Winston Zeddmore, now the mayor or something like that, also funds a ghost lab with containment tanks that allow ghosts to be observed. Like an aquarium!!! One minor ghost seen in this gallery was known to the production team as "Bonesy," and was originally going to resemble the skeletal Bad to the Bone Ghost from the Real Ghostbusters toy line. It was also going to be a puppet!

Sadly, Bonesy would later become a more nondescript CG creature, though on the other hand, that makes it a completely new ghost, and it's fairly cool in its own right. It's not really a "skeleton" anymore, but it is a fleshy humanoid with a skull-like head, having only a thin layer of skin, and lots of long, thin, translucent teeth borrowing once more from abyssal sea life. One of the scarier looking spirits we've seen in any of the movies...maybe even the scariest, even compared to its "big" villains?

POSSESSOR

Possessor makes for a fun little gimmick, a spectral entity that specializes in taking control of inanimate objects, most memorably running around as a garbage bag for a while before jumping to one of the iconic stone lions guarding the city library.

Possessor unfortunately has no design of its own in the final film, simply "zapping" from one object to the next as a bolt of red energy, but early concept art depicts it as a blue cloud of vapor with a toothy grin and beady black eyeholes, which I think is pretty cute!

PUKEY

Another that escapes from the ghost zoo, Pukey is a funny little potato-shaped creature with tiny, nubby limbs, shiny solid black eyes and a big, comical frown. It's seen rolling awkwardly around instead of walking or even supernaturally floating, and seems almost helpless, but what Pukey can do is pop open its jaw and spew a seemingly limitless volume of slime. It's another that feels intentionally iconic on a similar level to Slimer and Muncher, and it works! This is the kind of thing I want to see more of! More peculiar creatures that balance strangeness with simplicity, and emphasize some novel ability or surprise twist. I guess I'm saying Ghostsbusters needs to take more inspiration from Pokemon.

GARRAKA

Garraka is the main antagonist of Frozen Empire, and "works," I guess, but sadly just doesn't leave much of an impression on me. The whole premise of the character is that he controls ice and he's powered by fear, so like, if you're afraid of him, you freeze to death. I get that it's kind of a take on fear giving you "chills," but it still feels to me kind of like two unrelated themes forced together, neither of which are all that new or exciting on their own and unfortunately fail to make anything all that interesting together; we just see a whole lot of colorless ice crystals and have to be informed that it's because of people getting scared.

A cool enough design could have made up for a somewhat underwhelming theme, but Garraka's physical anatomy is also made up of fairly conventional elements. A grey, emaciated humanoid, like a tall and stretched out mummy, with big giant demon horns. A less humanlike face, something less capable of recognizable expressions, might have gone a longer way to something both more memorable and more menacing, but overall this guy just comes out feeling like a D-list Soulsborne enemy. They honestly would have been better off just bringing a Real Ghostbusters villain to the big screen, like the Boogieman, Grundel or Samhain. Even a fairly generic nonhumanoid monster would've been better than just a grey guy. Eh.

PHOSPHOR (UNUSED!)

I'll end this on a ghost that didn't actually make it into Frozen Empire, just so we end on something I really like again, though I guess the fact that it was scrapped still makes this an overall downer. Phosphor was actually replaced altogether with Bonesy, I guess because they wanted something more threatening, but they easily could have thrown both of them in! All we know about Phosphor is that it was going to glow, presumably well enough to be named after it, and that it looked like a big round balloon with long, trailing jellyfish-like tentacles and a couple of simple small eyes. There's a few other little nodules on it in the artwork that may have been additional, smaller eyes scattered around its "face," but I'm not sure, and it has no trace of a mouth or any other features from what we can see. Perfect! Another fun, simple formula!

Overall, I have to say that the new sequels are doing a mostly decent to great job with new ghosts, but there really aren't enough of them. There weren't all that many distinct ghosts in the original two films, which I reviewed all in a single article nine years ago, and virtually no "creature designs" at all in the 2016 film. Why, in 2024, are big-budget movies called "Ghostbusters" still so dang stingy with the actual GHOSTS? There were episodes of the first animated series with massive numbers of them on-screen at a time. If I were ever going to watch a new Ghostbusters movie in theaters, I'd want at bare minimum one ghost per dollar they charge me for the ticket. That's still not even that many. That's just ten depending on the theater chain, though more commonly fifteen to twenty. I'm not even picky about how they're used. You can shove them all together in a crowd scene like the aliens in the Star Wars cantina if that's all you can think to do! Don't worry! I'll comb through and figure them all out and review them anyway! Hop the HECK to it already!



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