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"Home Is Where the Horror Is" is the eighth episode of Extreme Ghostbusters, first aired September 10, 1997. The team investigates a house on a candy-selling route after two boys go missing, and discovers the building itself is a living, predatory ghost. The episode was directed by Frank Squillace and written by Neil Ruttenberg, with animation by Koko Enterprise Company, Ltd.1
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| Egon Spengler | Eduardo Rivera | Roland Jackson | Garrett Miller | Kylie Griffin |
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| Janine Melnitz | Slimer |
Two brothers, Frankie and Len, are out after dark selling chocolate bars for P.S. 52 to raise money for new school computers, with a bicycle promised to anyone who sells out. Against Len's nerves, Frankie insists on trying one last house, dismissing the local haunted-house rumors. An elderly woman answers, buys a dollar's worth of candy, and invites the boys inside to wait in her parlor while she fetches her purse. The door closes on them and the boys scream. Outside, the eyes of the door knocker glow red.
At the firehouse, Garrett Miller is grinding through arm curls while fasting for a metabolic weight-training program, and Eduardo Rivera torments him by slowly eating chocolate bars. Kylie Griffin brings up the summer solstice and the old belief that demons and spirits feast at midnight on the longest night of the year. Janine Melnitz calls them all downstairs at Egon Spengler's request.
A husband and wife explain that their two sons vanished three days earlier while selling candy, and that there is a haunted house on the same street. Egon's records turn up a long history of ectoplasmic infestations and disappearances tied to the house. Roland Jackson drives the team out in the Ecto-1. The same elderly woman answers, lets them into the parlor, and gives a vague account of her evening watching television. When Eduardo finds a P.S. 52 chocolate bar on the floor and the team turns to confront her, she is gone and the parlor reshapes itself around them.
Moving deeper into the house, the Ghostbusters meet the ghost of a man by a fireplace who, on realizing they are still alive, frantically warns them to leave before midnight, then is dragged away by an unseen force. Furniture sprouts claws and teeth and attacks; they blast it apart and the remains seep back into the walls. A ghostly maid appears, speaking in French and hurrying off to "La Maison's feast." Kylie reads almost no P.K.E. off the victim ghosts that surround and then vanish in pain.
In a room full of clocks, Kylie connects the pieces: the house is the ghost, La Maison being French for "the house," and everything is building toward a demon feast at midnight. The cuckoo-clock birds transform and attack. Past giant gears and a swinging pendulum, the team corners the maid, whose face is half decayed, and she finally points them toward the missing boys, who are found suspended in pure ectoplasm. Kylie determines the entity is a giant parasite that feeds on flesh and traps its victims' spirits to dissolve them slowly. Garrett frees the boys with a careful shot, and the team fights toward an exit, blasting through a flame-breathing mass of kitchen objects and cutting a new doorway through a wall to send the boys home.
The house seizes Garrett and collapses part of the roof on the others. The elderly woman reforms from a ball of slime, reveals her true shape as a giant slug-like creature, and is blasted back into the house. The whole structure turns to ectoplasm; the team fires back-to-back at maximum dilation and the house caves in. The freed victims disperse, and the maid blows a kiss to Eduardo before fading. Eduardo pockets the door knocker as a souvenir, only for it to come alive as a serpentine ghost; the team traps it. The episode ends with Garrett chasing Eduardo over the last P.S. 52 chocolate bar.
The episode was produced as part of the first and only season of Extreme Ghostbusters, with overseas animation handled by Koko Enterprise Company, Ltd. Frank Squillace directed and Neil Ruttenberg wrote the script.1 It was assigned production number 108 and broadcast as show number 8 in the series run. In the broadcast order it followed The Infernal Machine and preceded Killjoys.
The regular voice cast includes Tara Charendoff as Kylie Griffin, Maurice LaMarche as Egon Spengler, Jason Marsden as Garrett Miller, Pat Musick as Janine Melnitz, Alfonso Ribeiro as Roland Jackson, Rino Romano as Eduardo Rivera, and Billy West as Slimer. Guest voices were provided by Thomas Dekker, Justin Jon Ross, and Susan Silo.
La Maison (French for "the house") is the primary antagonist of this episode. It is a powerful ghost entity that takes the physical form of an entire house located in the Bronx, which had accumulated a 50-year history of disappearances and "bizarre occurrences" in the neighborhood. The creature's interior is pure ectoplasm, functioning like the lining of a stomach. It draws victims inside, devours their flesh, and imprisons their spirits to dissolve them slowly over time. Its most prominent physical manifestation is an elderly woman who serves as a kind of mouth for the organism; her true form is a giant green slug creature. Every object inside the house, from the furniture to the cuckoo-clock birds to the kitchen implements, is an extension of La Maison's body and capable of attacking. The creature's true "heart" is the ornate door knocker on the front door, which survives the destruction of the house as a serpentine ghost and is subsequently trapped by the team. Kylie identifies La Maison as the type of entity described in folklore as feasting at midnight on the summer solstice. Firing their particle throwers at maximum dilation causes the entity's physical structure to cave in, releasing all imprisoned victims.
Thomas Perkins, who provided production artwork for Extreme Ghostbusters, noted that the furniture monsters from this episode were the first entities he designed that made it to air on television.1 The EGB toyline later included a figure called "House Ghost" depicting the elderly woman's giant green slug form.
The maid ghost is one of La Maison's long-term victims. She appears partially decayed, speaks in French, and refers to herself as preparing for "La Maison's feast." She ultimately relents and directs the Ghostbusters to the imprisoned boys. Kylie notes that the maid and the other victim ghosts register almost no P.K.E., confirming they are prey rather than part of the entity itself. The maid blows Eduardo a farewell kiss as she disperses after the house is destroyed.
La Maison is the second ghost house in the Ghostbusters franchise continuity; the first appeared in the Real Ghostbusters episode "Mrs. Roger's Neighborhood."
The title plays on the saying "home is where the heart is."
Kylie describes the summer solstice as the longest night of the year, which is backward: the summer solstice is the longest day, and the longest night falls on the winter solstice. The belief Kylie describes actually pertains to the winter solstice, though she may also be alluding to Samhain traditions.
The script is dense with pop-culture references. Eduardo invokes The Twilight Zone, and Garrett calls the fireplace ghost "Rod Serling." Garrett riffs on the magazine Better Homes & Gardens with "Better Homes and Horrors," Eduardo name-checks the Roach Motel and game-show hosts Monty Hall and (after being compared to defense attorney Johnnie Cochran) the TV detective Columbo, and Frankie asks Roland if he is Batman, to which Roland answers that he is Batman's cousin, "Ghostbuster Man."
Garrett lists Jell-O among the few things he is allowed to consume during his metabolic fast, alongside his complaint about chocolate.
The elderly woman, while posing as a harmless local, tells the Ghostbusters she was watching Wheel of Fortune on the night the boys went missing. The show was produced by Columbia TriStar from 1994 to 2002.
Garrett nicknames Roland "Rose-ster" during the episode. Garrett also calls Eduardo "Romeo" (after the Shakespearean character) and mocks his goatee.
Kylie studied one semester of French, which she uses to follow the maid ghost's dialogue and piece together the meaning of "La Maison."
"Ok lets stop pussy footing around here! This house is haunted; true or false?" -- Garrett Miller
Eating a munch bar "MMM, man this is tasty, perfect amount of crunch, yah know? And then you bite down into the caramel, mmm, provides just the right amount of chewyness. But how do I describe the Nugget center? Its, its... Its a stone full blown taste explosion." -- Eduardo Rivera
Kid (after being rescued): "Alright! Are you Batman?" Roland: "No, I'm his cousin; Ghostbuster-man!"