FEATURE: H. P. Lovecraft Presents "Ghostbusters"

Parapsychology, the study of psychic abilities, began in the late 1800's.  It was an effort by advocates of psychic events to legitimize their findings by placing such phenomena inside the scope of scientific inquiry.  The field grew in stature well into the early 1900's, and Stanford opened a branch of study on the subject in 1911.  Notable scientists like J. B. Rhine and Karl Zener tried to validate such phenomena with repeated tests, rather than with anecdotal case studies.  If the name "Zener" rings a bell, it's probably because of his now-famous Zener cards, and if you're wondering why they sound so familiar, it's because Pete Venkman used them to seduce a co-ed.

The movie Ghostbusters arrived just in time for the last gasps of legitimate parapsychology, which is funny, because the first burst of legitimate study coincides with the late cycle of H. P. Lovecraft stories.  Lovecraft himself likely enjoyed the subject, since his stories were so often about placing supernatural creatures and ideas into an explicable context.  Mythical gods were interstellar aliens.  Demons were inter-species half breeds.  Ghostly cities were simply spilling in from other dimensions.  Lovecraft, like Rhine and Zener, didn't need to believe in mystical forces - reality was bizarre enough.

So, you see, there's a thread connecting Lovecraft to the Ghostbusters already, and that's before we examine the film more closely.  Doing so, however, reveals a worldview shockingly in line with the fiction of Lovecraft.  From the overall scope of the narrative to the smaller details, Ghostbusters holds an additional layer for genre fans as an affectionate pastiche of H. P. Lovecraft's work.  So the next time Stuart Gordon is held up as the paragon of adapting Lovecraft, you can show off by citing the following*.

Gods

H. P. Lovecraft is most famous for the propagation of a cosmology called the "Cthulhu Mythos."  In works like "The Call of Cthulhu," "Dagon," "The Dunwich Horror," and "At the Mountains of Madness," Lovecraft created a rogue's gallery of alien deities.  The most famous is the eponymous Cthulhu, but others include the globular Yog-Sothoth and the blind idiot-god Azathoth.  In Ghostbusters, the chief thread is the ancient god Gozer, who was worshipped by Sumerians, Mesopotamians, and...what's that word...Hittites.  This god, like Lovecraft's, is corporeal enough that Ray can ask Gozer to return to her home or to the nearest "convenient parallel dimension."

Shapeshifters

Gozer is described variously as the Traveler, the Destructor, and (redundantly) the Gozerian, and its true form is unknown.  The being can manifest as a slender female, but that's just a placeholder, and Gozer announces late in the film that the ghostbusters must "choose - choose the form of the Destructor!"  They choose a marshmallow man.  Lovecraft created a near-identical god: Nyarlathotep (sound it out).  Nyarlathotep jumped from form to form, but it presented itself frequently as a tall and slender gentleman (hrmmmm).  Unless it wanted to be a giant mutant bat or a mass of slithering tentacles.  Also called the Crawling Chaos and the Beast of a Hundred Names, he walked among humankind and influenced people to worship the unspeakable.

Cults

Lovecraft's Elder Gods frequently required the worship and aid of human cults, if they hoped to regain access to Earth, a power they lost centuries ago.  From "The Call of Cthulhu":

Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate them.

Writers Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd produced a backstory for their interdimensional threat by explaining that Dana Barrett's apartment building was designed by a mad architect who got deep into "Gozer worshipping."  He gathered adherents for black masses, and, at the top of the building,

"They conducted...bizarre rituals, intended to bring about the end of the world, and now it looks like it may actually happen!"

Interestingly, the secret society of Ghostbusters formed in 1920, the same year Lovecraft wrote the short story, "Nyarlathotep."  Cue piano keys.

Architecture

Speaking of Dana's apartment, one of Lovecraft's most intriguing details, across his bibliography, is the attention to architecture.  He loved describing incongruent angles and cyclopean buildings and nightmare vistas of gargantuan cities.  As a man who saw himself first and foremost as a New Englander, Lovecraft would have adored the attention paid to New York's Gothic architecture.  Not just the apartment building itself, with the eldritch shrine adorning the top, but the continual attention paid to the chiseled statues that ornament the city.  The Grecian that appears beneath the main title and the lions at the public library are the chief examples.  Their presence visually prepares viewers for the terror dog statues (which might otherwise seem ridiculous), but they also add some flavor to the setting.

Tools

As mentioned earlier, both Lovecraft and the writers of Ghostbusters don't have any genuine supernatural occurrences, because they place their "supernatural" creatures and situations in a scientifically explicable cosmology.  Ghosts are electromagnetic and ectoplasmic beings, quantifiable and destructible**.  So the Ghostbusters can craft technology to combat their enemies.  Proton packs and PKE meters and containment units.  In "From Beyond," Lovecraft's characters peered into the unknown thanks to an advanced spectrometer called the Resonator, and, in "Dreams in the Witch-House," Walter Gilman uses non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics to explain the witch's "paranormal" abilities.

Books

H. P. Lovecraft created an arsenal of fictional "research" to lend credence to his invented gods.  The most famous is undoubtedly the Necronomicon, but he also created the Pnakotic Manuscripts and borrowed Robert E. Howard's Unaussprechlichen Kulten.  I hope I spelled that correctly.  These books functioned as all fictional books do: they provide handy exposition when the author can't find a better way to explain what the hell's going on.  When they interview Dana Barrett for the first time, the 'busters make mention of the Spates Catalog and Tobin's Spirit Guide as valuable sources of information.  Later in the film, Peter is able to give Dana the lowdown on Gozer, and Egon lectures about the mad architect Ivo Shandor.  This connection becomes more present in the sequel, when Ray opens up a bookstore dedicated to occult tomes.

Along with these overarching similarities, there are smaller connections.  Lovecraft's Gods, due to their limitless size, viewed men largely with indifference, and Gozer holds no interest in the 'busters as threats, because they aren't gods.  Additionally, Lovecraft's cosmology held little interest in religion, and, while Zeddemore "loves Jesus's style," he and the 'busters speak of "biblical" disaster only in relative terms.  Outside of Winston, religious figures are painted as ineffectual.  A Catholic bishop is nervous of taking a public stance on the ghostly tumult, and when Hasidic Jews chant outside Dana's apartment, their prayers get lost in the din of the surrounding crowd.  Even the Marshmallow Man makes clear the "smallness" of religion when he literally steps on a church.

Finally, if you thought Lovecraft had a way with verbose, doom-laden paragraphs full of dense prose and archaic language, listen to Rick Moranis:

Gozer the Traveler!  He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms!  During the rectification of the Vuldrianaii, the Traveler came as a large, unmoving Torb, then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Sloar!  Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was like to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day, I can tell you!

It's just like Lovecraft.  Only funnier.

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* This is a great way to break the ice at parties.
** This ironically represents the largest difference between the two fictions.  Ghostbusters is optimistic about defeating dread abominations from beyond.  Lovecraft was more of a glass-half-empty kind of guy.