The fourth of the “Ghostbusters” series is here. Installments of the supernatural comedy were released on-screen in 1984, 1989, and 2016 (the all-female reboot). In 2021, 32 years after the original Vigo spirit (named after a barbaric Balkan ruler of the sixteenth century) was dispatched, the ghostbusters are back. This time the setting is Oklahoma, not New York City. Not only do the “winds come whistling down the plains” but this new setting experiences unusual earthquakes, due to the underground lair of the ancient Mesopotamian/Sumerian demon Gozer. In an old abandoned mine, the film’s protagonists discover a temple to Gozer. The female lead, 12-year-old Phoebe, ends up battling the demons herself, aided by the appearance of her dead grandfather, the original ghostbuster Egon Spengler. Gozer and his minions are eventually trapped, and Spengler disappears once again into the afterlife—who knows where, but definitely not heaven or hell.
Just fiction, you say? No big deal? If you are a Christian, are you okay with someone coming back from the dead to overcome evil? Do you think it is all right to posit the idea that light beams from a ghostbuster gun can overcome supernatural, evil spirits? And consider this. Not only does Spengler assist the final battle but earlier he’s seen as a ghost playing chess with his granddaughter. He also leads her to the ghostbuster gun he hid in his former life. To whitewash this occult comedy, a Christian would have to overlook the suggestion that communication with the dead, a capital crime in Old Testament times (Deuteronomy chapter 18), can be a positive, supernatural phenomenon. That’s blasphemy of the worst order.
Let’s be plain, here. Gods like Gozer are more than fictional remakes. They were, and are, real demon entities. You can’t trap a demon such as Gozer in a cave. Demons are immaterial spirit beings not confined to physical “ghost traps.” The dead can’t come back (Hebrews 9:27) because the dead are assigned by God to heaven or hell, not some intergalactic netherworld. Claiming to consort with the dead is deemed necromancy in the Bible, an evil the Old Testament calls an “abomination,” something utterly detestable, and atrocious which is cursed. And to have a man once dead return to fight an evil demon is an upside-down spiritual universe, evil fighting evil, a moral contradiction.
This movie is just one more way that Hollywood presents the occult as innocuous, even humorous. Since the original Ghostbusters film, an entire generation has been brainwashed to believe that the paranormal world is inhabited by dead beings who are sometimes friendly, even helpful. This movie makes a passing reference to Revelation 6:12, the opening of the sixth seal causing a great earthquake. But when that awful hour comes, no proton pack (the fictional energy-based ghost-capture device) will escape God’s wrath, more terrible than any doughboy demon. In that hour, Revelation 6:15 declares that both great and small will seek death to escape the wrath of God against all witchcraft and the occult. As verse 17 goes on the say, “For the great day of His wrath has come, and who is able to stand?” The answer is no one. Not even the ghostbusters.
