“Whaddaya Mean Biblical?” Apocalypticism and Apocalypse in Ghostbusters (1984)

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the sci-fi horror comedy film Ghostbusters (1984) from an exegetical perspective of reception history with a focus on questions of apocalypticism and apocalypse. This splits the study in two, with the first question being what the four ghostbusters of the movie mean when they talk about the end of the world in a biblical context: their apocalyptic hermeneutic. To find this the intertextual theory of Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg is applied to categorize the different uses of Bible pericopes by the ghostbusters, by which transplantations of NT verses are most common, followed by transgressions of OT motifs, an individual transumption of the Book of Revelation and a transplantation and transgression of the idea of universal resurrection at the end of time stemming from the reception history of the Bible. Most found pericopes allude to an eschatological milieu of God’s wrath, and the NT texts also link this to the Parousia. What can be said about how the ghostbusters use these texts is however in a secularized and dechristologized understanding, where natural and supernatural disasters are mentioned with the Day of the Lord playing a not more than allegorical role. The second part of the work answers the question what the apocalypse per se of the film is instead, and not what any character means by this. With the help of John J. Collins’ apocalyptic definition derived from his master-paradigm, a proto-apocalypse can at least be seen in Ghostbusters (1984). This is primarily made possible by the film’s inclusion of revelatory content exposed to the character Dana Barret (Sigourney Weaver) by an otherworldly mediator but limited by the lack of an explicit transcendent reality with temporal and spatial aspects within this.