“The franchising rights alone will make us rich beyond our wildest dreams,” Dr. Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) tells his colleague Ray (Dan Aykroyd) as they discuss their startup business of busting ghosts. More prophetic words have never been spoken. The second-highest-grossing film of 1984, Ghostbusters inspired a sequel, a re-imagining, and a reboot, which had its own sequel. There was also an animated TV series, a toy line, and a cereal with, of course, marshmallows. Its legacy is one of controversy: The 2016 all-women remake with Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy was targeted by online misogynists who tanked its ratings on sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. The more recent reboot, 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, directed by Jason Reitman (son of Ivan Reitman, who directed the original film), and its subsequent 2024 sequel both made money, but they are often cited by critics as bitter examples of the industry’s creative bankruptcy that turns original properties into craven fan service.
Forty years on, the original Ghostbusters remains a hoot, but it’s also easy to see it as the author of all our pain. It’s a wildly funny supernatural comedy built on both an innovative idea and the individual personalities of its stars, but as the film goes on, it largely drops the humor and devolves into set pieces. The spectacle is deeply imaginative—even on the ninth rewatch, it’s still thrilling to see the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man appear in glimpses between skyscrapers—but the favoring of grandiosity over small, character-driven comedy would, over the next several decades, be taken to its most awful and logical conclusion. The Marvel movies owe much of their schtick to Ghostbusters, although instead of carefully building to a big, shiny action sequence, they drop one in every 20 minutes, ruining the pace and dulling the senses.
Ghostbusters wouldn’t be made today, and not because of the incessant smoking, the spectral fellatio, or Venkman’s aggressive stalking of Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver). No, Ghostbusters would be laughed out of studio boardrooms today simply because films this original don’t get made with this large a budget ($30 million, which would be close to $100 million today). There is no cinematic antecedent here. No genre conventions to follow. Sure, the comic chemistry between Venkman, Ray, and Egon (Harold Ramis) has its roots in classic comedy teams like the Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello, but the overall tone, story, and core idea feel conjured from nothingness. Somehow, the three principal actors plus the director created something that felt like it had always existed and was just waiting to be birthed. From the classic Ghostbusters logo and the uniforms to the hit theme song by Ray Parker Jr., Ghostbusters arrived fully formed and fully confident in its own existence.
The idea was first hatched by Aykroyd, who has always harbored a fascination with the supernatural. His enthusiasm drives the story, both on screen and off. Ray’s wild-eyed zeal blends seamlessly with Egon’s hardened rationality. It’s easy to see how they linked up with Venkman, who knows how to work a room (or at least, he thinks he does), and handles all the public-facing duties of their little research team with aplomb. Aykroyd and Ramis provide able support, but Murray is the clear star. His trademark blend of sarcasm and vulnerability plays well in a sci-fi comic blockbuster, where he’s needed to hold down a love story, while undercutting the scientific grandeur with bemused quips.
But if Ghostbusters has no past and speaks to the future, how is it also so profoundly of its time? Made during Ronald Reagan’s first term, the film evokes a deep conservatism that encompasses much of the era’s right-wing rhetoric. Reagan spoke often of America’s crumbling cities, demonized the very federal government that he led, and fearmongering about rising crime rates. It’s all there in the Ghostbusters, who could be seen as a privatized response to urban crime. Sure, the ghosts are not criminals, but the terror they provoke in city residents feels like a manifestation of how conservatives framed city life. Of course, it’s a problem that the government itself is ill-equipped to solve. After the trio gets fired from their federally funded research gig at the film’s start, Ray bemoans their predicament: “You don’t know what it’s like out there,” he tells Venkman. “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”
It’s a good joke that also provided a loud dog whistle to conservative viewers who grinned along with Reagan when he spoke of the nine scariest words in the English language: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
Just to be clear about the government’s inability to protect the public, the film fashions an antagonist of Walter Peck (William Atherton), a sniveling Environmental Protection Agency representative who, understandably, wants to regulate the Ghostbusters’ facilities. For a moment at least, it’s easy to understand Peck’s point. The government does have a right to make sure this new technology doesn’t pose any risks to the public. Yet as he is played by Atherton (essentially reprising his role as a snotty journalist, another enemy of the right, in Die Hard), the character is impossible to sympathize with, especially when he shuts down the storage facility out of spite and unleashes hell on the city. Yes, the federal government nearly brought about the end of the world because they didn’t trust a working man to take care of his own business.
Does this rampant conservatism make Ghostbusters hard to watch for good progressives? It shouldn’t. When you parse their politics, most blockbusters are conservative because reinforcing the status quo is more enjoyable than challenging it. Films that present a coherent worldview should be appreciated even if that worldview clashes with yours. It gives us an opportunity to think critically about how art invariably reflects the culture from which it is made, turning us into more savvy viewers. Ghostbusters, for all its wonderful silliness, is an artifact that helps us understand its time, as well as ours.
Ghostbusters (PG, 105 minutes) screens on Aug. 30 at 2:45 p.m.; Aug. 31 at 7 p.m.; Sept. 1 at 11 a.m.; Sept. 2 at 8:20 p.m.; and Sept. 3 at 7 p.m at AFI Silver. silver.afi.com.