Rowan (Neil Casey), the central villain of the new Ghostbusters, is a nerd. He’s so lame, in fact, that he erroneously flashes the hand-sign for “love” – not devil-horns – as he walks into an Ozzy Osbourne concert. His modus operandi is to provoke enough spectral disturbances around New York City that he unleashes a concentration of angry ghosts into the world. He insists that their voices, like his own, have fallen on deaf ears – “kindred spirits,” if you will, to his own underappreciated, “the-world-must-pay-for-my-failings” mentality.
When Rowan optimizes his powers, he resorts to the lameness of having a bunch of cops and National Guardsmen strike Saturday Night Fever poses for his own amusement. Furthermore, he even co-opts the classic “Ghostbusters” logo and repurposes it in order to take on his final form, which bears a resemblance to a slightly less blobby Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
It’s hard to tell whether the character of Rowan was a bit of snarky commentary in director Paul Feig’s and co-writer Katie Dippold’s script, which hews closely to the story structure and character-development style of the1984 original. It was a given that a few kooks hiding behind anonymous social-media handles would take to the web to spin their opinions on why an all-female version of Ghostbusters could never work, but the reality was a more widespread outcry.
Like the Westboro Baptist Church, the trolls of the Internet found their target, lugging a ten-ton bucket of bile on their backs in an act of assumed pop-culture purism. When prolific YouTube personality James Rolfe (better known as the Angry Video Game Nerd) released a video stating why he wouldn’t be seeing the new film, he became a folk hero to those anonymous online voices while stirring the anger of trolls eager to burn a path to the film’s box-office failure.
I guess they figured Feig, Dippold, and everyone involved with the new Ghostbusters owed them something – that “something” being a reboot sans estrogen. The outrage even prompted distributor Sony to buckle, promising the outraged contingent a male-centric version, a development that has gone curiously silent. (And I gotta say: what a bunch of pussies for undermining their own film.)
I didn’t go out of my way to read any of the vitriol; I didn’t seek out negative hashtags on Twitter. I have enough real things to worry about in my life – things that affect me on a daily basis – without going out of my way to find more things to get pissed off about (I haven’t been a teenager or a twentysomething in a long time). Granted, I will admit that one of my favorite pick-me-ups is reading negative reviews of the Electric Factory (a popular Philadelphia concert venue) on Yelp – the difference being, I can vouch for the awfulness of the venue based on years of experience attending concerts there (fuck you, Ticketmaster!).
For me, the art of slagging something only takes on artistic value when you’ve actually exposed yourself to what you’re slagging. If you’re basing your opinion solely on conjecture, rumor, and a 2-minute trailer without having seen the film itself, then you deserve to be shamed when someone who’s done their due diligence calls you out on it.
Granted, I read articles about the backlash for months before the film was released. While it is customary to respond to remakes, prequels, and sequels of well-regarded films with apprehension, the pre-emptive scorn loaded upon Feig’s Ghostbusters was more hair-raising than witnessing an actual supernatural occurrence. We horror fans might be the most apprehensive of all, perhaps because our much-beloved genre receives so little respect in the first place: many among us bristled at the notion of The Hills Have Eyes being remade, only to discover that, hey, Alexandre Aja actually knew what he was doing!
Funny: I am as big a fan of the original Ghostbusters as anyone else. That film, and especially the long-running cartoon series, served as my gateway drug into the worlds of horror and the fantastic. Even though the film is not formally classified as being a part of the genre, you can find it reviewed in VideoHound’s Horror Show, John Stanley’s Creature Features, and my first-ever book on the genre (which I still own) – Movie Monsters (“Ghostbusters is scary and funny,” author Gary Poole proclaims). I can nerd out about the Murray-Aykroyd-Ramis-Hudson films with the most devoted of nerds, and that is something I take great pride in.
To be continued…
* Author’s Note: The title is a deliberate nod to Barry Keith Grant’s The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, which I would recommend to anybody interested in gender studies as it relates to the horror genre.
Part II available Wednesday, August 24!
Crash Analysis Support Team:
Jonny Numb (aka Jonathan Weidler) co-hosts THE LAST KNOCK horror podcast with @crashpalace, and believes that demons are best expelled through writing (sorry, ladies). You can find his movie reviews here, and at loudgreenbird.com. He is also on social media @JonnyNumb (Twitter & Letterboxd) and @jnumb1 (Instagram).
(Photo by IndieWire.)