PKE Meters. Ghost Traps. Proton Packs. Those iconic beige overalls. And in an old barn, hidden beneath a tarp, the rusted visage of Ecto-1. In fact, the only thing missing from this trailer is a “focused, non-terminal, repeating phantasm or a class-five full-roaming vapour”.
Our first glimpse at the long-gestating follow up to 1989’s Ghostbusters II is all nostalgia; bottled, commodified, and peddled to a generation for which wistfulness often sells more than sex does.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife takes the hauntings out of New York and into small-town America. There’s a single mother and her two children (one of whom sports a startlingly familiar hairdo) moving into an unfamiliar mansion, in a rural town, that may or may not be connected to an evil Sumerian God named Gozer. (Was that Zuul or Vinz Clortho we see for a split second as we approach the second minute of the video?)
From classic haunted house beats, to The Monster Squad and Stranger Things feels (hey there Finn Wolfhard!), this is a trailer that makes full use of its two and a half minutes by priming you with the familiar. It eases you back into a story that is 30-years-old by being both self-referential and pop-culture savvy. Did you enjoy that Netflix series with strange supernatural happenings? Well, here’s more of that. Miss the all-American innocence of The Goonies and Hook? Have we got something for you!
This is a trailer that doesn’t just channel a yearning for the past by way of clumsy name-checking and shameless fan service. It is, instead, a product that is incredibly aware of everything that has come since and cleverly cashes in on that.
Colour me intrigued!
Ghostbusters: Afterlife stars Carrie Coon, Paul Rudd, Mckenna Grace, and Finn Wolfhard. With, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Sigourney Weaver all due to make cameo appearances. (Harold Ramis, who played Egon Spengler, died in 2014.) The movie is directed by Jason Reitman, who is taking over filmmaking duties from his father, the original Ghostbusters director, Ivan Reitman.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife arrives in cinemas in July 2020.
P.S. They’re not ignoring Paul Feig’s 2016 all-female reboot, that movie was just set in a different universe.
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