“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” director breaks down how they created Baggie, the haunted trash bag
Writer-director Gil Kenan tells EW that "the choreography of that character was some of the most hilarious" he's seen.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire.
It’s a pizza! It’s a paper plane! It’s… actually one pretty clever Possessor spirit.
While Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire features the return of some old haunts (hi, Slimer!), the latest installment also introduces fans to a whole new gang of ghouls ready to make their mark on Manhattan. That includes the Possessor, a laser pointer-sized red dot with the unique ability to take control of inanimate objects.
The small specter sneaks its way onto Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd), Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace), and Podcast’s (Logan Kim) quest for knowledge at the New York Public Library. While there, they meet Dr. Hubert Wartzki (Patton Oswalt), who reveals that the mysterious orb they’ve obtained can be opened by listening to a specific sound on an old phonograph cylinder. When he plays it out loud, the Possessor jumps into the cylinder and attempts to make its great escape by hopping into a trash bag, closing its ties around the music to create adorable bunny ears, and sprinting through the library.
Thus, Baggie was born. “The Baggie character, the choreography of that character, was some of the most hilarious I've… I hope I can release [it] in some of the extras,” writer-director Gil Kenan tells Entertainment Weekly.
The garbage ghost’s gleeful gait — which sees it bounce around corners and peek past library shelves — was largely created with practical effects.
“The SFX department created a trash bag that had a couple of footholds for a puppeteer to step into so that you could hobble around, so that I could block the sequences,” Kenan explains. “The performance of that trash bag with a performer's legs stuck into it is so hilarious and so close to the way that the final animation was created because it just created this loose, weird, goofy movement that I just loved so much.”
Although Baggie succeeds in making it out of the building, the Possessor ends up transforming into one of the library’s stone lion statues and fighting the Ghostbusters in broad daylight. When police arrive on the scene, it manages to sneak away once again without getting ghost-trapped.
Kenan considers Baggie and its hilarious library caper in Frozen Empire to be in line with the ethos of the Ghostbusters franchise.
“I mean, that's part of the spirit of Ghostbusters is the combat mixture of the incredible highs — things like [the film’s big bad] Garraka, a fully formed character, super scary, emotional, elegant, dimensional — and then on the other end of the spectrum, in the very same movie, you've got a literal trash bag that's running around leading our heroes on a chase through the public library,” he says. “That sort of encapsulates Ghostbusters.”
While he holds a fondness for Baggie, Kenan maintains that he loves “all my ghosts equally,” from Baggie to Garraka to the film’s little football-shaped spirit, Pukey. “Pukey is just you know… I want Pukey on my headstone when I die; I love that guy,” he teases, adding, “It's Pukey's world, we just live in it.”
Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire is in theaters now.
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Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.