Ghostbusters – Spiritual Reawakening

The ’busters are back in long-awaited legacy sequel Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a film that’s keeping it in the family both on and off screen. Jason Reitman and the next generation of spook-catchers answer Total Film’s call and reveal how their radical new take is keeping the spirit of a comedy classic alive.

- By Jordan Farley

Long before Jason Reitman was crowned king of the noughties comedy-drama, he was the world’s first Ghostbusters fan. The son of director Ivan Reitman, who called the shots on both Ghostbusters and its ’89 sequel, seven-year-old Reitman Jr. was bewitched by the work-in-progress cuts of his father’s latest film featuring four funnymen running around New York in boiler suits, catching ghosts with the unlicensed nuclear accelerators strapped to their backs. To say the film left a lasting impression would be an understatement the size of a rampaging Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

“It was a movie that I thought about more than anything, for years,” Reitman says over Zoom, speaking to TF while tousling a mop of unruly hair that could handily be described as Egon-esque. Several of Reitman’s earliest memories are from his time on the Burbank Studio lot, where much of Ghostbusters was filmed, including the day that William Atherton’s sniveling suit Walter Peck was buried under 50lbs of ‘marshmallow goo’ (it was actually shaving foam). Reitman was on the roof of ‘Spook Central’. He attended scoring sessions and countless early screenings. Naturally, he dressed up as a Ghostbuster for Halloween.

“There’s something about those first few films you love that develops your sense of language, almost where you see other movies through them,” says Reitman who, perhaps inevitably, would go on to direct comedic films himself. “Ghostbusters was part of my early language, just as a film fan.”