Gozer

Lore & Background

In the 1920s the cult leader Ivo Shandor and his followers prepared for Gozer's coming, predicting the years in which a cross-dimensional rip would occur and designing the apartment building at 550 Central Park West as an antenna to gather spiritual energy. The rip finally came in 1984: with the Ghostbusters' containment unit shut down and the city flooded with released ghosts, Zuul and Vinz Clortho, possessing Dana Barrett and Louis Tully, opened the gate from the building's rooftop temple.

Gozer appeared as a woman, attacked the Ghostbusters, then vanished and demanded that they choose the form of the Destructor. Ray Stantz could not stop himself thinking of a harmless childhood mascot, and Gozer reappeared as a skyscraper-sized Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Egon, reversing his own warning, told the team to cross their proton streams at the gate; the explosion destroyed the avatar, banished Gozer and closed the gateway. The 2009 video game brings back a revived Mr. Stay Puft, far weaker without a portal to Gozer's realm.

In Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Gozer is behind Egon Spengler's death: Egon had moved to Summerville, Oklahoma, to stop its return through a second Gozerian temple in Shandor's mine. Zuul and Vinz possess Callie Spengler and Gary Grooberson and perform the rite, Gozer takes physical form, kills the revived Shandor on the spot, and is finally captured when Phoebe, Trevor, Callie and the original Ghostbusters, helped by Egon's ghost, trap her in the field of ghost traps Egon had buried on his farm.

Reader's Guide

Gozer is the franchise's apex threat and the reason the 1984 film's climax happens where it does: everything from Dana's haunted refrigerator to the Terror Dogs and Shandor's building is part of its summoning. Two ideas define it. First, it needs a Gatekeeper and a Keymaster, so separating Dana and Louis is the Ghostbusters' first plan. Second, it lets its victims pick its destroying form, which is how a marshmallow mascot became one of cinema's best-known monsters. Peter Venkman mocks it with nicknames like 'flat top', and in Afterlife Winston Zeddemore admits he privately called it 'muffin'.

Did You Know?

• Gozer has used other Destructor forms in other dimensions, including a Torb, an eel-like creature, and a Sloar, a venomous reptilian humanoid.
• The 1984 summoning is known within the franchise as the 'Manhattan Crossrip of 1984'.
• Gozer's cult on Earth is dated to around 6000 BC, before it was banished by the Babylonian goddess Tiamat, a backstory expanded in the 2009 video game.
• In Afterlife, Gozer conjures Mini-Pufts, tiny marshmallow minions, out of Stay Puft Marshmallows.