Ghostbusters 4 director promises fans that the sequel is "scary" as he teases new villain

Who ya gonna call? Although four decades have passed since the original movie released, the answer is still the Ghostbusters as we gear up for the release of the upcoming sequel. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which follows on from 2021's installment Afterlife, picks up where we left off with the action now taking place back in the franchise's original home of New York.

This time around there's a brand new threat for the Ghostbusters gang to handle: an army of ghosts complete with a very, very chilly summer known as 'the Death Chill'. Director Gil Kenan, who previously helmed 2015’s Poltergeist remake as well as the Scream TV series, teases the haunting nature of the villain with his promise that this Ghostbusters film will be a "scary" one. 

Speaking to SFX magazine in the new issue, which features Dune 2 on the cover, he reveals that you should expect both laughs and scares aplenty: "This is a scary Ghostbusters movie, I set out to go for the thrills. As a big-screen experience, I think it’s going to play like a scary, funny movie. The secret is that the scarier a scene is, the funnier the next joke is going to play. That’s the way that the pendulum swings with tone. Twisting that lever to make sure that the scares land is a way of making sure that the jokes are funnier."

But who or what exactly is 'the Death Chill'? Whilst Kenan and co. are keeping their cards close to their chests, we do know that it's a mysterious specter that freezes over the city, killing people off purely through fear itself. We also know that it is unrelated to the series' previous big bad Gozer, with the director emphasizing that time is now over.

He adds: "We’ve moved past the mythology of Gozer, which defined Ghostbusters and was rekindled in Afterlife as a way to close that initial loop. We have finally freed ourselves to now introduce a whole new menace, and with that, we’ve created a new mythology and we’ve expanded how deep and how frightening and how dangerous a villain can be in one of these stories."

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Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire releases in theaters on March 22. The above is just a snippet of our interview, available in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Dune: Part Two on the cover and is available on newsstands from Wednesday, February 21. For even more from SFX, sign up to our newsletter, which delivers all the latest exclusives straight to your inbox.