Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

It was Ghostbusters day on the 8th, and Sony Pictures decided to celebrate a little early, reports Alasdair Stuart.

Holding an event at the FDNY Hook & Ladder 8 Firehouse, the filming location for the Ghostbusters’ home since the first movie, they celebrated the year long Ghostbusters Give Back charity initiative and unveiled the logo for Ghostbusters: Night Shift. Due to release next year, Nightshift is a Netflix/Sony co production. It’s the first return for the series to animation, from what we can tell, since The Real Ghostbusters which is both a core memory for an entire generation (including me) and still one of  the weirdest and best cartoons to come out of the West.

Night Shift, even going off the logo, seems to be building on that. We’ve got a Ghostbusters logo but run through what looks like old fashioned newsprint and stained with grime in places. There’s a ‘negative’ hand, a clawed hand and the iconic ghost has a photograph of a downturned human mouth. What could this mean? I think we’re looking at one of two possibilities:

1. The Other Side

That twisted logo suggests we might be dealing with the ghostbusters who work human cases. Sergei Lukyanenko’s classic Night Watch series followed this exact concept with two armies of supernatural forces using peace keepers called the Day Watch and Night Watch depending on which side they were on to keep the peace. More recently the wonderful Dark Side Detective games played with the same idea.

2. Only in the Dark

The other possibility is a team of Ghostbusters who can’t really go out in public, Vampires maybe but the hands say ‘not human’ to me. Maybe it’s ghosts working off their ‘sentence’? Or monsters trying to rehabilitate their image.

We’ll find out when the first trailer hits, which will be a while yet but early signs are promising we’re about to get someone else to call.