Plot
A man breaks into the Metropolitan Museum of Art at night, tripping the perimeter cameras as he climbs through a window. Making his way past a Celtic art exhibit, he is startled by a strange statue. He starts to pick the lock on a display case but two guards appear, and in the scramble he knocks into the statue and grabs its staff. A smaller statue beneath the main figure opens its mouth and a pouch slides out. As the thief grabs it, a rune slips free. One of the guards, Bobby, picks up the rune. A portal opens, a fire-breathing demon comes through, scorches the displays, and seizes Bobby. The portal closes, the thief flees, and the second guard is left in shock.
At the firehouse, the team is off duty. Kylie Griffin reads while Eduardo Rivera loses a game of chess to Slimer, with Garrett Miller and Roland Jackson watching. After Slimer slimes one of Kylie's books, a priceless volume titled "Galileo and His Studies of Medieval Poltergeists," Eduardo dismisses her reading as a waste of time and the team needles him over whether he reads at all. Egon Spengler interrupts with a call: a large ecto-ethereal disturbance at the Metropolitan Museum.
At the museum, the rattled guard recounts the demon spitting fire and taking Bobby. Garrett gets a P.K.E. reading off the statue, which a display label identifies as Kahlil, an ancient demon god. From the guard's description of the tile Bobby picked up, Kylie deduces it was a rune, and the guard recalls the thief was carrying a pouch full of them.
The thief, Steve Rifkin, tries to sell the pouch at Bruno's Pawn Shop. Bruno offers ten dollars, but when he handles a rune the demon appears and takes him, declaring Rifkin the "Keeper of the Runes" with the power to summon rather than be summoned. Rifkin realizes what he has. Cornered in an alley by a loan shark named Mr. Hammer and two thugs, Rifkin hands out runes; the demon drags one thug into the portal while the others scatter. Ecto-1 arrives and the team opens fire, but the demon shrugs off their throwers and grabs Kylie, then throws her aside when it finds she is "not chosen." Kylie deploys a trap, but the demon overpowers the vortex and escapes. The captured men are delivered to Kahlil in his dimension, where he proclaims them slaves summoned by the cursed power of the runes.
Back at the firehouse, Janine Melnitz maps the disappearances, all clustered in lower Manhattan. Kylie pieces together the lore from a book titled "Pagan Rituals & Ceremonies": the runes come from a pagan festival held in ancient Iceland once every thirteen years, at which thirteen "chosen ones" were sacrificed to Kahlil. Each victim who touches a rune is transported to Kahlil's dimension and enslaved with no way back. Egon and Roland retrieve the museum's security tape and identify the thief as Steve Rifkin, then have Janine reluctantly hack the DMV records for his address.
Rifkin, gloating over newspaper reports of the disappearances, leaves a rune with an annoying newsstand vendor, who is promptly taken. The team reaches Rifkin's apartment and chases him down the fire escape, into an alley, and onto a downtown IRT subway train. Rifkin keeps tossing runes, and Eduardo catches one; when the train stops, the demon appears and seizes Eduardo while Garrett collars Rifkin up on the street. In Kahlil's realm, Eduardo is assigned to catalog every manuscript in an endless "library of pain."
At the firehouse, Kylie finds an incantation in "Magic of the Runes" that can neutralize Kahlil, but it must be spoken inside the demon's dimension. Roland's plan: have someone touch the last rune to summon the demon, trap it to hold the portal open, and send a team through. Egon retunes the proton packs to the demon's exact P.K.E. coordinates so they will work this time. Roland touches the rune, the team blasts and traps the demon, and Kylie, Roland, and Garrett go through the portal while Egon and Janine finish the capture.
On the other side their equipment fails, and Kahlil knocks Garrett into the library, where he finds Eduardo. Kahlil pins Kylie and Roland and prepares to eat them. Kylie recites the incantation from memory but blanks on the final line, which Eduardo, having stumbled across it during his cataloging, supplies. Kahlil dissolves, the chosen are freed, and the team races back through the blinking portal before it closes.
Cast
Regular voice cast: Tara Charendoff (later credited as Tara Strong), Maurice LaMarche, Jason Marsden, Pat Musick, Alfonso Ribeiro, Rino Romano, and Billy West.
Guest voices: Gregg Berger, Earl Boen, Jess Harnell, and John Mariano.
Source material
The episode takes its title and core idea from M. R. James's 1911 ghost story "Casting the Runes" and its 1957 film adaptation, released as "Night of the Demon" in the UK and "Curse of the Demon" in the United States. The story, the films, and the episode all share a cursed object that marks a "chosen one" and brings a demon. The episode departs from the source in what the demon does: where the film's creature comes to kill its victim, the Extreme Ghostbusters demon carries the chosen away to Kahlil's dimension to be enslaved.
Notes
Egon paraphrases Peter Venkman at one point, repeating the old line "We zap him and trap him." Several of Garrett's quips reference real-world landmarks and pop culture: he calls the Kahlil statue the Venus de Milo and dubs the demon's realm "Never Never Land," from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. The downtown train Rifkin boards is the IRT, the Interborough Rapid Transit company that ran several of New York's original subway lines.
Roland references CliffsNotes, the student study guide series, during the team's research sequence. Rifkin's history with Bruno the pawnbroker goes back further than the runes: Rifkin had previously sold Bruno stolen Rolex watches. Eduardo, while reciting the last line of Kylie's incantation, references Henry Rollins, the American musician and spoken-word performer.
When Kahlil is defeated, he delivers a speech that echoes a famous monologue from the 1976 film "Network": Kahlil declares "You have meddled with the primordial forces, and you shall pay," which recalls Arthur Jensen's line "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And you will atone."
Kahlil's image appears in a background page of "Pagan Rituals and Ceremonies" in issue #11 of the IDW Publishing comic series "Ghostbusters: Volume 2," a visual callback to this episode.
The episode is preceded by "Deadliners" and followed by "The Infernal Machine."
