I spotted this trove of Halloween dolls inside a crane toy at a restaurant the other day and had to take a photo. That’s Peter Venkman (aka Bill Murray) from Ghostbusters, right in the middle. His sarcastic smile has been flattened by the cartoonery of it all…and this disturbed me a little, so I took a photo.
But then I looked over the photo again and realized why it really struck me as so creepy. It is downright odd for the hero of Ghostbusters to be trapped inside a glass cage, surrounded by monsters and ghosts and skulls… he should not be smiling! He is trapped in an ecto-containment unit — with all of his ghastly supernatural prisoners! And not only that, there’s a giant crane up above (unpictured) that I can only imagine will pinch-lift and then drop him back down into the bed of horrors over and over again throughout the harvest season to come.
This is like some cruel, sick Halloween joke in an Edgar Allan Poe universe. And I love it.