Is Buffy The Vampire Slayer Secretly Connected To The Best ‘80s Movie?

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 29 seconds ago

In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Giles is a Watcher who moonlights as a librarian. Unsurprisingly, he has an endless library of books that he uses to help Buffy fight vampires and other demons that go bump in the night in Sunnydale. If you look closely, you’ll notice that one of those books is Tobin’s Spirit Guide. Does that name ring a bell? It should. It’s one of the fictional texts name-dropped by Egon in the original Ghostbusters movie. While the book doesn’t play a major role in Buffy, it is surprisingly prominent, popping up in a dozen episodes.

In all likelihood, the writers and producers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer felt that Tobin’s Spirit Guide would fit right in as yet another Easter egg in this pop culture-obsessed show. However, there is no real reason to believe that Buffy doesn’t take place in the same universe as Ghostbusters. Later films in the franchise (including Ghostbusters II and Ghostbusters: Afterlife) reinforce this connection by confirming a startling fact: the reason that our favorite nerdy scientists have such a ghost problem is that the ultimate Big Bad of the franchise keeps trying to open new Hellmouths!  

Is Buffy A Ghostbusters Spinoff?

First, it’s important to talk about the timeline of these two franchises. After the events of Ghostbusters II, the team disbands because there are no new ghosts to catch. Ghostbusters: Afterlife reveals that the group broke up sometime in the ‘90s, and the most popular fan theories speculate they would have dissolved around 1995. This is significant because Buffy doesn’t become a Slayer until 1996, one year after the Ghostbusters disbanded.

Now, the elephant in the room (and what you’ve likely been screaming about for a minute or two) is that neither Buffy nor any of her friends ever references the events of the Ghostbusters films. Isn’t it weird that nobody, not even nerdy Xander, ever mentions the time a giant marshmallow man nearly did his own, super-sticky 9/11? However, it’s canonical in the Ghostbusters universe that almost everyone has a weirdly bad memory when it comes to ghosts. No officials in Ghostbusters II take the new spook threat seriously, despite the entire city being besieged by spirits only five years earlier. In Afterlife, seemingly nobody but Egon’s family and Paul Rudd’s character even remembers who the Ghostbusters are.

Horrors Of The Hellmouth

If a bunch of people in the Northeast and the Midwest don’t remember the Ghostbusters’ exploits, it makes sense that Buffy and the rest of her West Coast crew wouldn’t remember these stream-crossing heroes. The exception is likely Giles, who knows better than most people that ghosts, just like vampires and werewolves, are quite real. That’s why he has Tobin’s Spirit Guide. Like Egon Spengler and Ray Stantz, he wants to be prepared for Buffy’s inevitable clash with Sunnydale’s own spooks, specters, and ghosts. 

However, my theory is that Giles’ link to the Ghostbusters goes far beyond having his own copy of Tobin’s Spirit Guide. You see, one of his biggest priorities is ensuring that none of Sunnydale’s demons manage to open the Hellmouth. That’s because the Hellmouth is a portal to a different dimension full of absolute horrors. Incidentally, it’s established Buffy canon that there are multiple Hellmouths on the planet. This includes one in Cleveland that, since they have no Slayer, must be guarded by other do-gooders in the fight against evil.

Stopping The Apocalypse Before It Was Cool

What does this have to do with Ghostbusters? In the first movie, our heroes discover that Dana Barrett’s apartment was designed by Ivo Shandor, who (along with a small army of cultists) worships an interdimensional bad guy named Gozer. Their ultimate goal is to summon Gozer away from its home dimension and to Earth, where it will usher in a brutal apocalypse by summoning a Destructor. An evil portal bad guys are trying to open to summon an interdimensional villain to wreak havoc on Earth? That’s right, boys and girls, Ivo Shandor was trying to open a Hellmouth!

One of the quirks about Hellmouths is that, before they open, there are ominous portents. In Buffy, portents come in many forms, including earthquakes, insect swarms, and water transforming into blood. In Ghostbusters, these portents take the form of ghosts, and more of them appear as Gozer’s arrival nears. Ray and Winston even have a cheerful conversation about the increasing number of spirits, speculating that this might be a portent of an upcoming apocalypse.

Welcome To The Hellmouth, Ghostbusters

If the ghosts were portents of a Hellmouth about to open, that explains why they suddenly stopped appearing. In Ghostbusters II, we found out that ghost appearances started drying up after the Ghostbusters crossed the streams and defeated Gozer. Simply put, they kept the Hellmouth from opening, and afterward, the ghostly portents all disappeared. Incidentally, the Hellmouth in New York City may explain how these characters were able to invent proton packs, space-age technology that’s far too advanced for 1984. Buffy creator Joss Whedon once explained to writer/producer David Fury that energy from the Hellmouth “makes mad scientists out of humans,” allowing them to create impossible technology.

Incidentally, the pattern continues in later Ghostbusters movies. The team shuts down the Hellmouth in the first film, but in Ghostbusters II, the ghosts suddenly start appearing in greater numbers again. The team believes this is connected to the mood slime, but I think they have it backwards. The ghosts are actually a portent of another interdimensional door about to open, one which will free Vigo the Carpathian from his painting and unleash him on the planet. Afterlife explains that the ghosts mostly went away after this, which makes sense; the team shut down another dimensional portal, and the portents (the river of slime and the ghosts), subsequently disappeared.

If Only Buffy Tried Crossing The Streams

In Ghostbusters: Afterlife, ghosts suddenly pop up again in the Midwest, where former Ghostbuster Egon Spengler settled down and eventually died. Why? Because OG franchise villain, Ivo Shandor, had secretly turned an old mine into a temple to Gozer, complete with a sacrificial pit. This was another Hellmouth, one intended to summon Shandor’s favorite monster from another dimension. Ghosts began popping up as portents of the Hellmouth opening. The new Ghostbusters team discovers the mine and, with the help of the original team, defeats Gozer. However, they never really closed the Hellmouth (no crossing the streams or anything), which helps explain why ghosts are still around in Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire. 

There you have it, boys and girls. When Tobin’s Spirit Guide pops up in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s more than just another Easter egg. It is, in fact, a powerful clue that the world of Buffy and the world of Ghostbusters are one and the same. Buffy continued the same fight that the Ghostbusters began back in the ‘80s, and they (albeit unknowingly) became warriors in the wider fight between humans and demons. As a huge fan of both franchises, I’m left with only one question: did Giles get his copy of Tobin’s Spirit Guide from Ray’s Occult Books before venturing to the West Coast?