Yahoo Movies This Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer Easter egg points to a past villain's return
Ghostbusters: Afterlife released its first trailer online and the reception was perhaps not as overwhelmingly positive as anticipated. But what the trailer did have was plenty of nods to the original movies.
This is no clearer than in the main characters of the sequel, Phoebe and Trevor, who have moved with their mum Callie (Carrie Coon) to a small town in Oklahoma where they've inherited a farmhouse from from the father Callie didn't know.
Within the farmhouse, we glimpse Ghostbuster founder Egon Spengler's (Harold Ramis) collection of spores, moulds and fungi. The children also discover the dusty Ghostbusters equipment and a uniform with a name patch that says Spengler.
The connection to Egon had always been rumoured but the trailer confirmed it. The trailer also confirmed a connection to a villain only talked about in the original Ghostbusters movies: Ivo Shandor.
Ivo Shandor was the main antagonist of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which is widely considered to be part of the canon despite not being a film. In the video game, he is the leader of the Cult of Gozer.
Gozer is the main villain in the first two Ghostbusters movies, but Shandor is only mentioned. He is an architect and doctor ("…he performed a lot of unnecessary surgery") who designed 550 Central Park West.
If you remember, 550 Central Park West is integral to the first movie: it's where Dana Barrett and Louis Tully both lived. Egon himself reveals that Shandor is the one who constructed the building to be used as an antenna to summon Gozer the Destructor. In 1920, Shandor founded The Cult of Gozer.
So here's where it ties into the trailer for Ghostbusters: Afterlife.
In the trailer, the kids break into an abandoned mine and the sign reads Shandor Mining Co. DUN DUN DUN.
This definitely means that the mining company was set up so that Shandor could use whatever supernatural qualities were in the ground to further his goal of summoning Gozer to enact world destruction – his plan in the first movie, thwarted by the eponymous ectoplasmic-fighting team. Could it be a selenium mine? (The building's girders had selenium cores.)
If Egon relocated to Oklahoma to study the impacts of unseen ghosts, it makes sense that Shandor did the same – though with different goals in mind. And if the trailer is anything to go by, inheriting your fate from previous generations is obviously going to play a major part.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife will be released on July 10 2020.
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