Editorials
When “The Extreme Ghostbusters” Met Pinhead and His Cenobites
Unlike so many sports drinks and snack foods in the late-90s, Extreme Ghostbusters earned its extremity. The younger, decidedly hipper team never went after the troubled spirit of a BMX biker or unnecessarily wore sunglasses. Extreme Ghostbusters wasn’t completely blameless – the grunge-caked cover of the theme song does it no favors and the advertising just had to call it XGB – but its oh-so-edgy adjective really referred to the show’s hellbent dedication to scaring the bejesus out of its core demographic.
As it stood, Extreme was already a sequel to The Real Ghostbusters, a series that mixed in more than a little nightmare fuel with Saturday Morning fun until the Family-Friendly Police of 1980s cartoons forced the creative team to cut it out. Before Slimer was promoted to above-the-title talent, the Real Ghostbusters visited various forms of hell, dealt with repressed trauma from a closet-traveling boogeyman and battled a trenchcoated allegory for child abduction. However dark it got, the show always ended with the heroes dancing down the street in their bright, color-coded jumpsuits.
When some of the same producers decided to make a follow-up in the mid-90s, with the far-too-cheery working title Super Ghostbusters, they found a cartoon landscape much more accepting of adult themes. From tip-to-tail, Extreme Ghostbusters would be darker, even in the most literal ways. Gone was the toyetic, crayon-friendly palette and angular, anime-inspired style of The Real Ghostbusters. Instead, Extreme Ghostbusters showed a washed-out world where night seemed to last 23 hours a day and the edges weren’t softer so much as worn down.
The ghosts looked like broken carnival mirror reflections of those from the original series, almost more alien than supernatural (a Men in Black animated series in almost the exact same style would debut a month later). And whereas The Real Ghostbusters relied on a lot of misunderstood spirits that took something more compassionate than a proton stream to evict, Extreme Ghostbusters was almost wall-to-wall poltergeists. Cannibal clowns that spread like an infection. A return of the child abductor surrogate, this time two of them, in an episode that had to be toned down significantly from its first draft. Bone-stealing demons that leave victims barely alive and looking like deflated balloons.
And an entire episode based explicitly on Hellraiser.
“Deadliners” was the fifth episode of Extreme Ghostbusters’ one and only season, first airing on September 5th, 1997. The character list on the final draft of the episode’s script, penned by producer and returning Real Ghostbusters writer Duane Capizzi, makes it plain:
THE VATHEK – a trio of otherworldly, Hellraiser type demons.
With names like “Crainiac” and “Gristle,” these monsters were as close to Cenobites as a cartoon would allow. Dead skin peeled and pulled taut over the red meat underneath. The leader wears a buzzsaw down the center of his skull. Another has no skull at all, but a pile of gurgling flesh folds, an empty sleeve from which a smaller, pulpy nightmare occasionally emerges to scream. Stitched mouths. Surgical drills for hands. Hollowed out eye sockets. On a show frequently and fatally misplaced in a timeslot aimed at preschoolers.
And who’s responsible for these grotesque parodies of human biology?
H.P. Kline, a reclusive horror writer.
While the episode mentions Stephen King and softens the Lovecraft reference by renaming him J.N. Kline, it paints the fictional author most like another famous horror writer. Much like the rhyming R.L. Stine, Kline made a name for himself with a series of adolescent-aimed scary stories to tell in the dark that happen to start with the letter “G.” The only differences are that Kline’s series is “Gore,” the monsters are always the Vathek, and they just so happen to be real.
When reports come in that J.N. Kline has gone missing and locals have started disappearing around his remote, New England home, the Ghostbusters answer the call.
The monsters only borrow Hellraiser’s designs, eschewing the sexual sadomasochism for a motive kids could better understand and subsequently repress – the ritual carving and reconfiguration of human flesh. The Vathek consider skin nothing more than modeling clay and wax about “infinite aesthetic possibility” romantically and emotionlessly, somehow at the same time. The resulting plastic surgery successes are just as disturbing as their creators, if not even more so.
By the time the Ghostbusters find out Kline didn’t create the Vathek so much as make an ill-defined book deal with them, the episode hews closer to Lovecraft and another Lovecraft-inspired work, John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness, where another author is imprisoned by his fictionalized, if not quite fictional works. As expected, the Ghostbusters eventually defeat the Vathek, conveniently restoring all their butchered experiments to normal (a common, if understandable cop-out for the show).
At the time, syndicated cartoons ran for 65 episodes almost by default; five episodes a week for 13 weeks, allowing stations to easily program a quarter. Extreme Ghostbusters only saw 40 before it was cancelled. If the timeslot killed the show, a few years of erratically scheduled timeslots buried it. Home video did no further favors – six episodes reached VHS and 13 hit DVD, but only in Europe. Extreme Ghostbusters never quite got enough credit, especially compared to its beloved predecessor. At a time when neither was the norm, Extreme followed a diverse cast of characters into stories that toed the line between scary and terrifying for its adolescent audience.
Fortunately, the series is now streaming in its entirety on Hulu, so the curious and the Clive Barker fans can enjoy Extreme Ghostbusters a whole lot easier than ever before.
Having grown up in a religious family, Christian movie night was something that happened a lot more often than I care to admit. However, back when I was a teenager, my parents showed up one night with an unusually cool-looking DVD of a movie that had been recommended to them by a church leader. Curious to see what new kind of evangelical propaganda my parents had rented this time, I proceeded to watch the film with them expecting a heavy-handed snoozefest.
To my surprise, I was a few minutes in when Denzel Washington proceeded to dismember a band of cannibal raiders when I realized that this was in fact a real movie. My mom was horrified by the flick’s extreme violence and dark subject matter, but I instantly became a fan of the Hughes Brothers’ faith-based 2010 thriller, The Book of Eli. And with the film’s atomic apocalypse having apparently taken place in 2024, I think this is the perfect time to dive into why this grim parable might also be entertaining for horror fans.
Originally penned by gaming journalist and The Walking Dead: The Game co-writer Gary Whitta, the spec script for The Book of Eli was already making waves back in 2007 when it appeared on the coveted Blacklist. It wasn’t long before Columbia and Warner Bros. snatched up the rights to the project, hiring From Hell directors Albert and Allen Hughes while also garnering attention from industry heavyweights like Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.
After a series of revisions by Anthony Peckham meant to make the story more consumer-friendly, the picture was finally released in January of 2010, with the finished film following Denzel as a mysterious wanderer making his way across a post-apocalyptic America while protecting a sacred book. Along the way, he encounters a run-down settlement controlled by Bill Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a man desperate to get his hands on Eli’s book so he can motivate his underlings to expand his empire. Unwilling to let this power fall into the wrong hands, Eli embarks on a dangerous journey that will test the limits of his faith.
SO WHY IS IT WORTH WATCHING?
Judging by the film’s box-office success, mainstream audiences appear to have enjoyed the Hughes’ bleak vision of a future where everything went wrong, but critics were left divided by the flick’s trope-heavy narrative and unapologetic religious elements. And while I’ll be the first to admit that The Book of Eli isn’t particularly subtle or original, I appreciate the film’s earnest execution of familiar ideas.
For starters, I’d like to address the religious elephant in the room, as I understand the hesitation that some folks (myself included) might have about watching something that sounds like Christian propaganda. Faith does indeed play a huge part in the narrative here, but I’d argue that the film is more about the power of stories than a specific religion. The entire point of Oldman’s character is that he needs a unifying narrative that he can take advantage of in order to manipulate others, while Eli ultimately chooses to deliver his gift to a community of scholars. In fact, the movie even makes a point of placing the Bible in between equally culturally important books like the Torah and Quran, which I think is pretty poignant for a flick inspired by exploitation cinema.
Sure, the film has its fair share of logical inconsistencies (ranging from the extent of Eli’s Daredevil superpowers to his impossibly small Braille Bible), but I think the film more than makes up for these nitpicks with a genuine passion for classic post-apocalyptic cinema. Several critics accused the film of being a knockoff of superior productions, but I’d argue that both Whitta and the Hughes knowingly crafted a loving pastiche of genre influences like Mad Max and A Boy and His Dog.
Lastly, it’s no surprise that the cast here absolutely kicks ass. Denzel plays the title role of a stoic badass perfectly (going so far as to train with Bruce Lee’s protégée in order to perform his own stunts) while Oldman effortlessly assumes a surprisingly subdued yet incredibly intimidating persona. Even Mila Kunis is remarkably charming here, though I wish the script had taken the time to develop these secondary characters a little further. And hey, did I mention that Tom Waits is in this?
AND WHAT MAKES IT HORROR ADJACENT?
Denzel’s very first interaction with another human being in this movie results in a gory fight scene culminating in a face-off against a masked brute wielding a chainsaw (which he presumably uses to butcher travelers before eating them), so I think it’s safe to say that this dog-eat-dog vision of America will likely appeal to horror fans.
From diseased cannibals to hyper-violent motorcycle gangs roaming the wasteland, there’s plenty of disturbing R-rated material here – which is even more impressive when you remember that this story revolves around the bible. And while there are a few too many references to sexual assault for my taste, even if it does make sense in-universe, the flick does a great job of immersing you in this post-nuclear nightmare.
The excessively depressing color palette and obvious green screen effects may take some viewers out of the experience, but the beat-up and lived-in sets and costume design do their best to bring this dead world to life – which might just be the scariest part of the experience.
Ultimately, I believe your enjoyment of The Book of Eli will largely depend on how willing you are to overlook some ham-fisted biblical references in order to enjoy some brutal post-apocalyptic shenanigans. And while I can’t really blame folks who’d rather not deal with that, I think it would be a shame to miss out on a genuinely engaging thrill-ride because of one minor detail.
With that in mind, I’m incredibly curious to see what Whitta and the Hughes Brothers have planned for the upcoming prequel series starring John Boyega…
There’s no understating the importance of a balanced media diet, and since bloody and disgusting entertainment isn’t exclusive to the horror genre, we’ve come up with Horror Adjacent – a recurring column where we recommend non-horror movies that horror fans might enjoy.
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