Who You Gonna Call?

Mind Control, Mass Culture & Mediocrity

Let’s get one thing straight: I don’t do nostalgia. I despise it, in fact—I see it as an infantile coping mechanism for a civilization in decline, where adults cling to the cultural pacifiers of their youth rather than reckon with the bleak, rotting world around them. But if I had to pick one piece of pop culture detritus to allow past my barbed-wire threshold of contempt, it would be Ghostbusters. Or, more accurately, The Real Ghostbusters cartoon tie-in, which colonised my childhood with the efficiency of a DARPA-funded thought virus.

And now, staring down the barrel of 40—an age that feels like being handed your own autopsy report while still alive—I found myself rewatching the 1984 Film, again, instead of grinding out some other essay to put out on my cake-day. Call it therapy. Call it regression. Call it pattern recognition.

Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: if the 1980s were the adolescence of the American Empire's cultural psyche, then Ghostbusters was one of its dream journals, scribbled in slime-green ink and left on the night-stand for the CIA to photocopy. Before we had “see something, say something,” we had “who ya gonna call?”—a catchphrase so deeply embedded in the collective unconscious, you can practically hear it echo when a suburbanite calls the cops on a jogger.

At first glance, Ghostbusters is just a comedy. Harmless. Quirky. A crew of wisecracking pseudo-scientists shooting lasers at spectres and cracking jokes about Twinkies. But dig just a little, and the subtext starts to glow like a neutron-activated Ouija board.

Take Peter Venkman, the sleazy, snark-slinging heart of the team—played by Bill Murray at his smarmiest. A man with PhDs in psychology and parapsychology, which basically means he’s credentialed in the two academic fields most conducive to institutional gaslighting and esoteric nonsense. He’s not a scientist—he’s a grifter with tenure, a snake oil salesman wearing the skin of Carl Jung.

The experiment with which we are introduced to the character—where he fakes psychic ability tests to hit on a co-ed while shocking an actually gifted outcast—reads like satire but bleeds into something darker. It’s the perfect distillation of MK ULTRA’s public-private monstrosity: lies, torture, charisma, and behavioural control all wrapped in a charming smirk. A joke? Sure. But so was Operation Paperclip, until you realised the American government handed asylum to Nazi scientists in exchange for rocket ships and mood stabilisers.

Venkman’s disdain for bureaucracy is supposed to make him relatable, yet his answer to government incompetence isn’t principled resistance—it’s privatisation. Ghostbusters, Inc. is basically a Spectral Blackwater. They roll into town, unlicensed, unregulated, and equipped with untested nuclear reactors strapped to their backs, and the public eats it up. When the Environmental Protection Agency (represented by the hilariously impotent Walter “dickless” Peck) attempts to shut them down, he’s portrayed as the villain.

Because the real enemy of progress, you see, isn’t spectral possession or literal hell breaking loose over Manhattan—it’s government oversight. The message is unmistakable: real innovation, real “solutions” to supernatural (or social) crises, come from private hands. Preferably smug, sarcastic, and highly profitable ones.

This is Esalen logic. This is the New Age colonization of the Western mind. Ghostbusters might not be an Esalen production, but its philosophical DNA is all over the celluloid. That grinning, pseudo-spiritual libertarianism; the casual fusion of science and mysticism; the promise that “real knowledge” exists just outside the bounds of peer review, if you’re only brave (or arrogant) enough to seek it.

Esalen, that West Coast snake pit of enlightenment-era detritus, was the bastard offspring of Aldous Huxley’s mescaline visions and Gregory Bateson’s cybernetic fever dreams. It birthed the self-help cults, the self-actualisation seminars, the deep-state LSD seminars that make Heaven’s Gate look quaint. It welcomed everyone from Timothy Leary to Henry Kissinger with open arms and incense sticks. And somehow, that toxic mix of MK ULTRA dropouts, Cold War spooks, and Hollywood mystics became the spiritual backbone of America’s postmodern malaise.

Venkman, hilariously, fits right in. His charisma is weaponised. He knows the game is rigged and just wants a cut of the rake. When he talks about getting grants from MIT or Stanford, it’s not a joke—it’s a nod to the fact that the real machinery of psychological warfare and behavioural engineering isn’t operated in secret bunkers, it’s built on Ivy League campuses and pumped into the bloodstream of media which is more effective than any black-book MK-Ultra project. And effectiveness is the reason Ghostbusters remains iconic. It’s not just the proton packs or Slimer’s snot-trail antics. It’s because it was effective with everything it set out to do. It tapped into something primal—fear, laughter, powerlessness—and sold it back to us in a candy shell. It’s The Men Who Stare at Goats with merchandising. And just like that film, it hides its barbs behind humour, pretending that the real horror is supernatural when it’s really systemic.

It’s almost too easy to overlook Ghostbusters as just another Reagan-era popcorn flick—one more adolescent power fantasy dressed in supernatural drag, with Bill Murray’s greasy charm papering over the spectral absurdity. But peel back the layers of dry wit, special effects, and marshmallow men, and you’re left staring at something much stranger. And, frankly, more disturbing.

Because buried beneath the wry smirks and proton packs is a film that flirts—no, gropes clumsily—with a deeper metaphysical structure, one that doesn’t align cleanly with either the shallow empiricism of the “trust the science” crowd or the crystal-huffing superstition of your aunt’s tarot card dealer. The Ghostbusters are neither new atheists nor New Agers. They are something else entirely: priests in lab coats, conducting techno-rituals on haunted ground.

The most curious thing about the film is its high, almost fetishistic regard for science—not as a method, but as a mask. It cloaks itself in particle physics and engineering talk, all while spinning tales of apocalyptic entities from Sumerian cosmology. Ray speaks not with irony, but reverence, about “the aetheric plane,” as if he’s describing an unmeasured, mystical substratum of reality—one which has somehow been conveniently bypassed by peer review. This is not positivist science. This is Hermeticism with funding.

Which brings us to Peter Venkman’s lab. Amid the frat-boy sexual harassment and faux psychology experiments, there sits a wall poster—a depiction of none other than Hermes Trismegistus, the mythical progenitor of the Hermetic corpus. You don’t accidentally decorate your lab with esoteric iconography unless you're either a moron or a mystic. Venkman, being neither, is telling us something with that décor: this “science” is just a delivery system. The ghost-busting business is occultism in drag, a rationalist reboot of spiritual warfare.

The supporting cast paints the dichotomy in starker, more misanthropic relief. On one side, we have the arch-skeptics—intellectual mouthpieces of institutional disbelief, Michael Shermer clones decades before he needed cloning. These are the bureaucrats, the politicians, the experts who smugly dismiss the otherworldly until it punches them in the face—or in this case, flattens their city block. On the other side, we have the hysterics, the believers, the woo merchants of Edgar Cayce’s lineage, drowning in a swamp of vague feelings and celestial vibrations.

Even Winston, the supposed “every-man,” manages to stumble into more theological clarity than the film’s PhDs. When asked if he believes in the end of the world, he says flatly, “I’ve seen shit that’ll turn you white.” His apocalyptic intuition, rooted in a half-remembered Sunday School eschatology, turns out to be closer to the mark than the smug disbelief of the EPA or the archdiocese. In fact, even the Catholic bishop—like most of his real-world peers—recognises the demonic when he sees it but still shrinks from the implications. Because what self-respecting priest would dare admit that demons exist? That’s bad PR.

This brings us to the real question: what is ghost-busting actually about?

Let’s start with Dana Barrett—Sigourney Weaver in possessed goddess mode—whose name, “Dana,” is no coincidence. It's an echo of “Danu,” the Indo-European mother goddess and matron of fertility cults. Dana becomes the Gatekeeper, sexually paired with Vinz Clortho, the Keymaster. This is not just pseudo-Sumerian gibberish—it’s sex magick 101. The sacred union at a ritually charged high place—Shandor’s tower—is a textbook alchemical hierogamy, the fusion of male and female principles to manifest an androgynous god-being, in this case, Gozer the Destructor.

But who is Gozer? An “androgynous” Sumerian demigod summoned by a secret society of elite technocrats, led by Ivo Shandor, an architect—or, let’s say it properly: a would-be Great Architect. He creates a ritual skyscraper, channelling the ceremonial geometry of the elite’s real-world obsession with sacred space and vertical power. His goal? To collapse the veil between worlds and bring about a metaphysical cataclysm.

And the Ghostbusters stop it. With lasers.

But let’s not pretend they’re heroes. They’re just the other side of the same Gnostic coin: the demiurgic janitors cleaning up after a botched apocalypse. They don’t destroy evil; they neutralise it, contain it, taxonomise it. They’re not holy men—they’re bureaucrats of the abyss, cubicle mystics with PKE meters. Ghost-busting isn’t about salvation or understanding—it’s about control. The ultimate triumph of the managerial class over the numinous. The kind of spiritual warfare that comes with a billable invoice.

Which brings us, uncomfortably, to the present. If Venkman’s smarmy manipulations and faux-objective psychology seem vaguely familiar, it’s because they are. Dr. Richard Gallagher, in a now-infamous Washington Post article, discusses modern cases of demonic possession in chillingly clinical terms. The afflicted speak languages they don’t know, reveal secrets they shouldn’t know, demonstrate knowledge that should not be theirs. Venkman, in his own detached way, does exactly this: he plays the role of a psychological exorcist, masking his rites with pseudoscience, charming Dana with a sleight-of-mind as old as Mesmer.

And let’s not kid ourselves—he gets the girl not because he’s noble, but because he’s the high priest of the age’s dominant religion: scientific occultism. He doesn't kill Zuul; he represses it. He doesn’t destroy Gozer; he defers its return. The great theological question—What is evil, and how should we treat with it?—is replaced by a customer service model. Ghosts are just glitches. Hauntings are property damage. Possession is a medical liability. Call the Ghostbusters, and they’ll slap a trap on your metaphysical problem and wheel it off to some spectral landfill, probably subcontracted to Raytheon.

Although not an exact match, the name “Ivo Shandor” practically reeks of Anton Szandor LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan and chief marketer of suburban hedonism disguised as metaphysics. Like LaVey, Shandor is the architect of a theologically inverted spiritual order—one that isn’t content to play with Ouija boards or flirt with blasphemy, but aims to accelerate the heat death of the cosmos via ritualised apocalypse. And in a move that even Aleister Crowley might find a bit on the nose, the film openly declares that Shandor’s cult was founded for one purpose: to bring about the end of the world by unleashing “the Destructor.” Because naturally, nothing screams avant-garde esotericism like summoning an angry god-thing to New York through an orgy in a penthouse.

This is not subtle, nor is it satire. It's straight out of The Book of the Law and the worst fever dreams of Jack Parsons. The sexual magick component—Vinz Clortho and Zuul rutting atop a ziggurat before unleashing Gozer—is textbook Crowleyan metaphysics. Literally sex as sacrament, orgasm as invocation, and possession as the medium by which the “key” and “gate” are united to open a rift in reality. Dan Aykroyd wasn’t joking. This isn’t metaphor. It’s esoteric LARPing rendered in blockbuster gloss.

And that rift—the Stargate, the portal, the Abyss—it too has a scriptural analogue. John of Patmos saw it in his Revelation, and even that grizzled lunatic couldn’t outdo the writers of Ghostbusters for dramatic flair:

“The fifth angel sounded his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from the sky to the earth. The star was given the key to the shaft of the Abyss… They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon and in Greek is Apollyon—Destroyer.” (Revelation 9:1-11)

Gozer, Abaddon, Apollyon—call it what you like. The point is that the gate opens through ritual, and the entity released is the angel of annihilation. But instead of horsemen or fire and brimstone, the apocalypse in Ghostbusters is heralded by a pastel vortex, lightning effects, and a 100-foot marshmallow mascot. Pop occultism sanitised for mass ingestion.

The ritual is obvious: Zuul and Vinz Clortho, the Gatekeeper and Keymaster, fornicate on an altar that looks like a cross between a Babylonian ziggurat and the altar at Bohemian Grove. Post-coitus, they lie together, basking in the energy they've released—the metaphysical climax having opened the gateway. And what do we get? Gozer, the androgynous destroyer in Sumerian drag, sashaying down the rooftop like Ziggy Stardust on judgment day. This isn’t just demonology—it’s techno-Hermeticism with an FX budget.

Jamie Hanshaw has written extensively on the sexual underpinnings of ancient Sumerian cults, and how the sacred prostitute was a medium of divine energy. This pairs rather neatly with the Crowleyan obsession with sex magick, where Eros is not merely pleasure but a metaphysical battering ram. And Ghostbusters gets this right—not just thematically, but ritually.

And if you're wondering where this all comes from, look no further than Dan Aykroyd himself. Reportedly a Freemason, raised by generations of spiritualists, and practically marinated in ghost stories. His great-grandfather held séances. His grandfather tried to build a spirit radio. His father kept an occult library. Dan didn’t write Ghostbusters from pop culture—he wrote it from the family grimoire. The film is his initiatory ritual, disguised as comedy.

The sequel hammers this even harder: Ray Stantz now owns an occult book-store, a literal keeper of forbidden knowledge. This isn’t satire. This is a generational obsession with the spirit world polished for multiplex consumption.

But what’s most grotesque is what Ghostbusters actually teaches us: That even the gods can be put on a leash. That the supernatural can be neutered, tagged, and stored away in a little metal box in a basement. The film’s “nuke packs” aren’t just weapons—they’re techno-priestly sacraments, avatars of man’s belief that he can conquer spirit through gadgetry. The moment the Ghostbusters trap Gozer, the message is clear: The divine is now subject to audit.

When the EPA—thinly disguised as the Cathedral’s earthly enforcement arm—shuts down the containment unit, it’s not just a dumb plot device. It’s a symbolic gesture: the technocrats in government can’t be trusted with spiritual infrastructure. Only private “scientific” high priests—egomaniacs with half-baked PhDs—can save the world.

And then there's the ultimate inversion: the film’s climax, where the Ghostbusters must “cross the streams”—a violation of every in-universe safety protocol—to reverse the gateway and implode the spiritual axis. This isn’t science fiction. It’s an alchemical sacrifice. Matter and energy reversed. Time-space folded. The “crossing of streams” is nothing less than the obliteration of boundaries—the final desecration of the sacred for the sake of man’s dominion.

Is it any wonder the film ends with the adoration of the crowd, cheering the slayers of the gods? And look closely: behind this adulation stands the Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Plaza, a clear symbol of man’s theft of divine fire. We’re not just watching a movie. We’re watching a Gnostic revolt against Heaven rendered in popcorn cinema.

“Ghost-busting” is not the rejection of superstition in favour of reason. It is the execution of the divine by a cabal of scientific necromancers. It is the triumph of techne over theos. The gods are dead—not by Nietzschean despair but by nuclear-powered plasma streams fired from particle accelerators mounted on backpack harnesses.

And when Gozer asks, “Are you a god?” the only possible answer, the only Promethean response left, is: “I will be.”