There’s something strange in these exclusive Ghostbusters: Afterlife images

Ghostbusters: Afterlife will be haunting multiplexes soon, and it promises to be something of a spiritual reawakening for the franchise.

Unlike the 2016 film which was a full reboot, Afterlife is a continuation of the originals, picking up in real-time from where Ghostbusters II left off. In the present day, a family - Callie (Carrie Coon), Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) and Trevor (Finn Wolfhard) - moves into a ramshackle Oklahoma farmhouse, which belonged to their late father/grandfather, Egon Spengler.

This being a Ghostbusters movie, of course things start to go bump in the night, terrors begin to manifest, and marshmallow mascots are causing chaos.

Another crucial element of Afterlife that connects it to the franchise’s past, it that director Jason Reitman (Juno, The Front Runner) has inherited the megaphone from his father Ivan Reitman, who directed the first two films.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife features on the cover of the upcoming issue of Total Film magazine, and below you can see three exclusive new images, featuring Reitman on-set alongside an iconic vehicle, Grace’s Phoebe on the ghost hunt, and Mr Grooberson (Paul Rudd), Podcast (Logan Kim) and Phoebe investigating the weird goings-on. Check them out:

“My father would goose me all the time about when I was going to make a Ghostbusters film, as much as everybody else did,” Reitman tells Total Film. But he was reluctant to make the leap from premier member of the Ghostbusters fan club (having been on-set as a kid) to the series’ on-screen steward. “It never really felt like it was my story to tell. This was my father’s story, and I certainly was scared of stepping into his shadow.” 

All that changed “around a decade” ago when two images popped into his head out of nowhere. “I saw a 12-year-old girl, with a Proton Pack, out in a field, and I saw a 16-year-old boy in Ecto-1, drifting through wheat,” Reitman recalls. “I had no place for them, but when Harold Ramis passed, it hit me there and then that: ‘Oh, this is the Spengler family.’ It became about a family who develop the confidence to pick up the Proton Pack.”

Ghostbusters: Afterlife opens in cinemas in the UK on November 18 and on November 19 in the US. For much more on the film from Reitman and his cast, pick up a copy of  the new issue of Total Film magazine when it hits shelves (real & digital) from Thursday, October 14.

Check out the new cover below, as revealed by Jason Reitman on Twitter:

And if you’re a fan of Total Film, why not subscribe so that you never miss an issue?