How John Belushi inspired ‘Ghostbusters’ greatest hero and slimiest villain
The career of American comic John Belushi may have come to an abrupt and tragic end, but his legacy lives on. Shortly before his death from a drug overdose in 1982, the actor had been cast as Dr Venkman in an upcoming supernatural comedy called Ghostbusters. Sadly, he never got to take on the role, and it went to the brilliant Bill Murray instead. Despite never starring in the film, his presence ripples throughout Ghostbusters.
Speaking to Psychology Today in 1996, Harold Ramis explained how Belushi had inspired the character of Venkman. “No one had done it,” he said of the groundbreaking script. “I don’t like to do things that I feel like I’ve seen before. Dan had written Ghostbusters for himself and John Belushi. When he wrote it, it was really out there, the paranormal thing. But the best thing about it, I thought, was the mundane edge it had; that’s where I thought the comedy had to go. I played more to the science of it.”
Belushi and Aykroyd got to know each on the set of Saturday Night Live. Ghostbusters was intended as a continuation of their creative partnership, and Belushi was quick to accept the role of Venkman but died before principal photography began. Of course, the actor inspired more than just Venkman. As Steven Jonhson, the creator of the iconic Slimer puppet, recalled during a 2018 interview, writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis asked him to scrap the model he’d spent six months working on and recreate it to look like the recently deceased actor.
“That was the most annoying horrendous experience I’ve ever had working with art directors, producers, and directors, ever,” Johnson told Bloody Disgusting. “In the beginning, they asked for a ‘smile with arms’, but before I knew it, it was a goddamn bleeding nightmare…’ give him 13% more pathos, put ears on him, take his ears off, less pathos, more pathos, make his nose bigger, now his nose is too big, make his nose smaller…’ Are you kidding? ‘Make him more cartoony, make him less cartoony’. I almost fucking severed my own head during that process.”
Johnson’s stress levels hit even greater heights when Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd walked in and declared that they wanted Slimer to look like Belushi. “I didn’t know until the last fucking day,” Johnson began. “I’d been working for six months sculpting hundreds of Slimer variations, and they finally said, ‘make him look more like Belushi’, and I said ‘what the fuck are you talking about?’ … So I pulled out a stack of headshots of John Belushi, poured a gram of cocaine on it and started chopping lines up”.
After snorting three grams worth of lines, Johnson entered a state of what he later described as a “cocaine-induced delusional paranoia”. In the midst of this, he “literally thought that John Belushi’s ghost came to me to help me out”. According to Johnson, the ghost of Belushi convinced him to continue his work while pointing out that he might want to lay off the white stuff.
So, as it turns out, Ghostbusters’ most iconic villain was actually intended as a tribute to the great John Belushi. You can revisit the moment Dr Venkman comes face to face with Slimer below.
