Early History
After 1920, Ivo Shandor and his cult followers constructed the Temple of Gozer atop the Shandor Building at 550 Central Park West. They also built a second, secret temple inside the selenium mine in Summerville, Oklahoma. According to IDW Comics' main continuity, the roots of the Gozerian cult stretch back to approximately 2800 BCE, when Tiamat guided her followers to banish Gozer from the physical plane via a massive interdimensional crossrip. The Gozerian temple in Shuruppak burned for nine days under blood-red skies as part of that banishment, and the surrounding population suffered plagues comparable to those described in the Bible.
Ghostbusters (1984)
The temple first manifested in 1984 through Dana Barrett's apartment refrigerator, where Ray Stantz glimpsed the Gozerian dimension, and later across the entire rooftop of 550 Central Park West. Over several weeks, Zuul and Vinz Clortho took possession of Dana and Louis Tully respectively, completed their ritual, and opened the portal. Gozer arrived between the two Terror Dogs in a female form.
The Ghostbusters, led by Peter Venkman, Ray Stantz, Egon Spengler, and Winston Zeddemore, lined up at the foot of the temple staircase. Ray formally ordered Gozer to cease all supernatural activity. When Gozer asked Ray if he was a god, his answer of "No" prompted Gozer to blast them all across the roof with lightning. Recovering, the team fired their proton packs at Gozer in unison; Gozer vanished from the platform, which the team initially mistook for victory. Egon's Gamma Rate Meter immediately showed readings going "extraordinarily bad." The disembodied voice of Gozer announced that the Ghostbusters must choose the form of the Destructor. Ray involuntarily thought of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, and a 112-foot tall Stay Puft manifested and began scaling the building.
With conventional proton blasts unable to stop Stay Puft, Egon proposed crossing the streams. The team converged their four proton streams directly into the portal, triggering a catastrophic explosion that destroyed the temple and Stay Puft, expelled Gozer, and released Dana, Louis, and all trapped ghosts from the portal. The explosion also took out a significant section of the Shandor Building's upper floors. Gozer was defeated, the psychokinetic atmospheric influence dissipated, and daylight returned over Manhattan.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
After discovering the second temple in Oklahoma, Egon Spengler infiltrated the mine and built a containment array of four Proton Cannons controlled by a modified PKE Meter. He designed the array to cross streams automatically and forestall Gozer's next prophesied arrival in 2021. One night in the summer of 2021, Egon captured Vinz Clortho and fled in a Shandor Mining truck, with Zuul in pursuit.
Egon's grandchildren Phoebe and Trevor Spengler, along with their friends Podcast and Lucky Domingo, descended the mine elevator and discovered the temple. They found the proton cannon array still active, the inscribed year prophecy on the wall, and Ivo Shandor's glass coffin. Phoebe deduced that the array's crossed streams had been suppressing the spectral horde rising from the sacrificial pit and triggering the seismic events plaguing Summerville.
After Vinz Clortho, now possessing Gary Grooberson, returned to the temple and deliberately disabled a proton cannon, the array failed. P.K.E. wisps flooded out of the pit; the temple walls burst through the mine structure. Gozer climbed out of the death pit gateway. Shandor briefly reanimated and formally greeted Gozer before being killed by the deity. Gozer reunited with Zuul and Vinz on the temple steps and took its throne.
Phoebe attempted to distract Gozer with jokes while Podcast remotely piloted the Remote Trap Vehicle to capture Zuul beneath the steps. Successfully trapping Zuul forced Gozer's form to destabilize. The team fled in Ecto-1 as Gozer and Vinz gave chase toward the Spengler farmhouse.
IDW Comics
In the main IDW continuity, a magical obsidian recreation of the temple was assembled by Idulnas for Gozer's rite of change. It was adorned with a crystalline motif reflecting Idulnas' appearance. Once the Re-Selection ritual concluded and Idulnas vacated the physical plane, the reconstruction disintegrated.
The IDW comics also posit that when the Ghostbusters crossed the streams on the Temple of Gozer in 1984, they were briefly connected to every reality at once. Their concepts, methods, and identities were seeded into the subconscious of the Multiverse, which the team later theorized explained the proliferation of Ghostbusters-style teams across dimensions observed during their travels with the Interspatial Teleportation Unit.
In the Transformers/Ghostbusters: Ghosts of Cybertron crossover, the Temple of Gozer appeared on Cybertron approximately 1,000 years before the present. After the Autobots abandoned Cybertron, Gozer arrived and offered the Decepticons a choice of their Destructor form. Starscream had a fleeting thought about a form mighty enough to destroy the planet; Gozer manifested as a giant version of Starscream and proceeded to destroy Cybertron.
Ghostbusters: Deviations
In this alternate timeline, the Ghostbusters chose not to cross the streams in 1984. Gozer became trapped in its Stay Puft Destructor form, which it despised. Thirty-one days later, the Ghostbusters devised a plan using the entity Tempore Ruga to send Gozer back in time to the moment before Ray chose the form. As a precaution, they plastered the temple with images of a fictional character, Loofajoe Rectangleshorts, to deter Gozer from accepting the same form again. Confronting the posters, Gozer acknowledged defeat and departed through the temple portal without further incident.
Production Notes
Ghostbusters (1984)
Production designer John DeCuir devised and supervised the construction of the Temple of Gozer set, which cost approximately one million dollars. At the time, it was widely recognized as one of the largest indoor sets ever built in Hollywood. DeCuir began with a small foam-core study model; director Ivan Reitman and special effects supervisor Richard Edlund used a makeshift viewer to plot camera angles before construction began. The finished set filled all of Stage 16 at the studio and stood roughly three stories off the ground, a height chosen to allow low-angle shots that conveyed the sense of standing atop a Manhattan skyscraper.
Cinematographer László Kovács faced significant challenges lighting the set. His gaffer Colin Campbell constructed light racks behind a painted New York skyline backdrop running over 400 feet long and 60 feet high, with 7,500 pieces of 300-watt mushroom globes positioned behind windows, skylines, and architectural details. Rigging and testing took six weeks. The power requirements were so extreme that other parts of the studio had to be shut down whenever the set was at full illumination. A giant 360-degree cyclorama encircled more than three-quarters of the temple and could be lit for either day or night exposures.
For the portal itself, DeCuir used plexiglass. Dry fog was pumped during photography to simulate smoke. The Terror Dog puppets were operated by concealed puppeteers while the dogs rested on their pedestals. Gozer's lightning blasts sending the team flying were achieved with stunt actors on wires; one stunt performer was injured after being launched upward and landing on the stone altar. The seismic disturbance sequence was done practically with sound effects and stagehands throwing rubble. Ivan Reitman's crew had at least one day of filming interrupted by mechanical difficulty opening the temple doors. Fire marshals were always present on set due to safety concerns.
The entire rooftop sequence took 21 days to film, according to Kovács. For the arrival of Gozer, Kovács used a strong backlight on the entire stairwell combined with cross-lighting to achieve an overexposed effect with the set bathed in light. The bright light from Gozer's arrival was achieved with a single light bulb on a wire.
For the climactic explosion, special effects coordinator Thaine Morris had Mark Stetson's team weld a quarter-inch steel frame around the temple miniature and fit deflector aprons to channel the blast. Morris then rigged the model with four naphthalene bombs. Still photographer Virgil Mirano was struck in the head by an errant bench during the detonation. After the miniature was destroyed, the production discovered additional pre-explosion shots were needed, requiring the model to be rebuilt.
Puppeteer Terri Hardin performed the female Terror Dog on set. During a lunch break, she ate inside the puppet while watching All My Children on the video monitor. Bill Murray snuck up on Hardin in the suit and startled her. Murray also arranged a prank on Robin Williams during a set visit: puppeteer Harrison Ray hid inside the Terror Dog puppet and stayed motionless until Williams leaned in for a close look, then roared and raised the puppet's front paws. Williams stumbled backward and nearly fell off the set before Murray and others caught him.
Once preliminary photography was complete, DeCuir's team redressed Stage 16 as the demolished version of the temple for the final scenes.
Script and concept notes: The August 5, 1983 draft of the screenplay described the Temple of Gozer as an exact replica of a Sebouillian temple. In the 1984 featurette "On the Scene with the Ghostbusters" (found in the Ghostbusters DVD Grab Bag extras), Dan Aykroyd described the structure as a pre-Sumerian temple. The temple's design was in part inspired by the book Rooftops of New York.
The real-world exterior of 550 Central Park West as seen in the film is a combination of the building at 55 Central Park West and extensive matte painting work.
Ghostbusters: Afterlife
For Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the mine set at the Calgary Film Centre was reported to be coming down on October 29, 2019. Production designer Francois Audouy drew inspiration from art deco, ancient Sumerian and Babylonian iconography, stepwells from South Asia, geometric patterns by architect Louis Sullivan, holy sites, monuments, mausoleums, cubist statuary, and a touch of Eastern European fascism. Ivan Reitman urged the production to go bigger with the temple, and the team looked to the Well of Souls from Raiders of the Lost Ark for scale reference.
The large Gozer statue was sculpted digitally in ZBrush and was heavily inspired by Polish sculptor Stanislaw Szukalski. Audouy's etched stone wall relief was directly based on the engraved doors from the original film; visual effects artist Kirsten Franson spent a long weekend building a working digital 3D model of the transition between the bas-relief rock face and the full ziggurat staircase. A physical study model was also built. Art director Bill Ives constructed a photo-realistic 3D model of the entire stage. Two versions of the stone stairway were built for filming: a "pre-stairs" bas-relief configuration and a "post-stairs" full transformed set, bridged by four fully digital shots animating the stairway extending from the wall. The slot canyon walls surrounding the temple were inspired by slot canyons in the Arizona badlands and the archaeological city of Petra in Jordan.
The mine elevator was built practically at 45 feet tall on the stage set. Everything in the set above 15 feet tall, along with the corner rock squeezes, used real rock. The floor was a foot of styrofoam sandwiched between plywood; a ten-person construction team cut a circle in the floor and slotted in the pre-built sacrificial death pit gateway. Gozer's throne was inspired by the basalt rock formations of Northern Ireland's Giant's Causeway and the architecture of Italian architect Carlo Scarpa.
The Terror Dog puppets proved too heavy for the initial temple set and it had to be reinforced overnight. Stop-motion animation was considered for the Terror Dogs running up the stairs and the possessions of Callie and Gary, but the idea was abandoned due to time constraints.
The Proton Cannon props for the four-cannon array were reworked by a team from the Alberta Ghostbusters fan group, who worked through a holiday weekend after the original props did not meet director Jason Reitman's expectations. The team also installed the cannons and their bases themselves, using pipe-fitting adapters bought from a local Home Depot, technically working outside normal on-set rules. Shannon Chapel worked on the PKE Meter prop connected to the cannon array.
Ivo Shandor's glass coffin was modeled after real enclosures used to display the embalmed bodies of historical and religious figures. Kirsten Franson modeled one of Audouy's sketches in 3D, which was distributed to the construction department. Shandor's tomb establishes his birth year as 1855 and his apparent death in 1945. For the scene where Gozer tears Shandor apart, a switch-blading animatronic puppet was built; J.K. Simmons watched his puppet double being ripped in half on set.
The Temple of Gozer's rooftop battle is a foundational moment in Ghostbusters fandom and one of the most frequently referenced scenes in GBFans.com's prop-building community. The proton pack firing sequences filmed on Stage 16, particularly the crossed-streams finale, inform many discussions about the correct appearance and behavior of the hero packs on-screen. The production's use of real pyrotechnics rather than pure optical effects for the explosion also speaks directly to the practical-effects ethos that runs throughout GBFans.com's interest in screen-accurate replicas.
The Summerville mine temple set from Afterlife drew significant community attention for the involvement of the Alberta Ghostbusters in its construction, a rare instance of a recognized fan group contributing physical prop work to a major studio production.
