Ghostbusters: Easter Egg Guide
-The first easter egg we see does not feel like a callback to Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters. Rather it appears to be an homage to another early modern blockbuster which clearly had a significant impact on Jason Reitman. As we witness supernatural activity occurring above a mountain in the American heartland of Oklahoma, the spectral ghost cloud which gather looks quite a bit like the extraterrestrial airspace created by UFOs over Devils Tower in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). This is an early suggestion, perhaps, that Jason is going to take this material in a different direction.
-We still quickly get a slew of Ghostbusters nods in the opening prologue as as we watch a man who is meant to be Egon Spengler reach his lonely farm and hold up a rusty ghost trap. But when his larger plan to capture the incoming demonic entity fails, he returns to the house and pulls out his old PKE Meter for a loving extreme close-up. It’s not clear why he does this other than to anticipate exactly when his fate will come…
-When the spectral form of Zuul kills Egon, the smoke invades beneath the door, and the demonic come out of his chair’s armrests. This recreates the scene where Dana Barrett is attacked and possessed by the same demonic entity in 1984. Although a CG Zuul face coming out of the smoke is a new touch.
-It’s also revealed in the opening that when Zuul has not possessed a human, it flies around as one of those reddish-pink spectral dots first established in Ghostbusters after the ghost containment unit meltdown at the firehouse.
-When our central family of Callie (Carrie Coon), Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), and Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) reach their inheritance on Egon’s dilapidated plot of land, they see Egon has scared off locals by spray-painting ominous passages from the Bible’s Book of Revelations, 6:12: “And I beheld when he opened the sixth seal, and, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair; and the moon became as blood.” This references one of the creepier moments in the original film where Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) debate whether Christianity is a mythology, and if the Bible predicting the dead rising from the grave has anything to do with their peculiar line of work.
-Inside of the “Murder House,” Phoebe and Trever seem to ignore the stack of books that goes up seven or eight feet in the background. This calls back the first bit of evidence of a haunting the guys found in the New York Public Library back in ’84, although Bill Murray rolled his eyes at the time and then snarked, “You’re right, no human being would stack books like this.”
