Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire – Film

In July 1904, New York City Fire Department (FDNY) firefighters find over thirty people frozen to death inside a gentlemen’s club, while an unintelligible chant plays from a phonograph. The only survivor is a woman in a suit of armor, clutching a mysterious orb.

In the present day, Callie Spengler, her boyfriend Gary Grooberson, and her children Trevor and Phoebe have taken up residence in the New York firehouse, while Trevor and Phoebe’s old friends Lucky Domingo and “Podcast” work with Winston Zeddemore and Ray Stantz. After catching the Hell’s Kitchen Sewer Dragon, the team faces backlash and threats from Mayor Walter Peck, a longtime opponent of the Ghostbusters.^[b] To appease Peck, Callie benches Phoebe from the field until she is a legal adult. Upset at this, Phoebe goes to a nearby park to play chess, meeting and befriending a ghost named Melody, who died in a fire with her own family when she was 16 years old.

Ray and Podcast have been collecting cursed objects at Ray’s Occult Books. One patron, Nadeem Razmaadi, sells Ray the orb, which belonged to his late grandmother. When Ray tests its PKE levels, the orb unleashes a psychic charge that damages the wall around the firehouse’s ecto-containment unit, which is dangerously near capacity. Winston and Lucky introduce the Spenglers to Winston’s privately-run Paranormal Research Center, where–despite having reverse-engineered Egon Spengler’s ecto-containment technology into a machine that can extract spiritual energy–Dr. Lars Pinfield is unable to pull anything from the orb.

Trevor, Pinfield, and Lucky visit Nadeem and discover the hidden brass-lined chamber where Nadeem’s grandmother stored the orb. A parapsychological evaluation by Peter Venkman reveals that Nadeem has latent pyrokinetic powers. Melody visits Phoebe at the firehouse, where she takes interest in the containment unit despite knowing its purpose. Secretly, Melody works to infiltrate the firehouse for the trapped entity from the orb, tasked to be close to Phoebe.

Ray, Phoebe, and Podcast visit Dr. Hubert Wartzki at the New York Public Library, where he explains that the orb was built to imprison a hellish god, Garraka, who sought to conquer their dimension with his ability to telepathically control ghosts and to lower temperatures to absolute zero when feeding upon negative emotions. Garraka was imprisoned thousands of years earlier by a group of sorcerers, the Firemasters, who utilized his weaknesses of fire and brass, only to be briefly freed by the Manhattan Adventurer’s Society in 1904. Garraka killed its members before Nadeem’s grandmother, a descendant of the Firemasters, recaptured him. Wartzki shows the group a phonographic cylinder which recored the ritual. A poltergeist, Possessor, attempts to steal the cylinder, which Phoebe destroys during the ensuing chase. Per the Ghostbusters’ anew disobedience, Peck condemns the firehouse, impounds their equipment, and charges Phoebe for delinquency.

Phoebe runs away from home to see Melody, and they break into the research center. Phoebe uses the lab’s experimental extraction machine to project herself as a ghost for two minutes so that she and Melody can physically interact, but Melody reveals that she made a deal to free Garraka from captivity in exchange for passage to the afterlife. Garraka forces Phoebe to recite the ritual chant, allowing him to escape to freeze the city. Realizing that Garraka intends to free the ghosts from the containment unit to rebuild his army, the Ghostbusters gather to defend their headquarters with new gear, while Nadeem dons his grandmother’s brass armor and attempts to master his pyrokinesis to help them.

When Garraka arrives, he easily overwhelms the Ghostbusters and breaks the containment unit, freeing the captured ghosts. Phoebe reconfigures her proton pack with a brass-like alloy, making Garraka vulnerable to its stream, but the entity also overpowers her. Melody, having realized that Garraka never intended to honor their deal, lights one of her matches for Nadeem to use its flame to help Phoebe restrain Garraka. Meanwhile, Ray utilizes the destroyed unit to interdimensionally banish Garraka. Helping the Ghostbusters allows Melody to ascend to the afterlife, and she reconciles with Phoebe before joining her family. The city thaws, and they hail the Ghostbusters as heroes; despite Peck threatening to shut the Ghostbusters down, they coerce him into supporting the team and reinstating Phoebe. The Ghostbusters begins pursuing the escaped ghosts, including the Sewer Dragon, Slimer, and the Mini-Pufts.