Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016)
Background and the Fourth Cataclysm
Rowan North accumulated an impressive academic record. He earned a Bachelors of Science in Physics from Stanford University and a Doctor of Science in Physics from MIT on June 6, 2007. He won the American Physical Society's J.J. Sakurai Prize (April 6, 2000) and the Hughes Medal (November 29, 2013), and briefly worked as a physics teacher, earning recognition from the American Association of Physics Teachers. Despite these credentials, Rowan felt the world responded to his abilities only with scorn. Having been bullied throughout his life, he eventually concluded that humanity as a whole was beyond redemption.
At some point, Rowan turned to paranormal theory as his instrument of revenge. He discovered the research of Erin Gilbert and Abby Yates, acquired a copy of their print-on-demand book Ghosts from Our Past, and recognized that their work on spectral energy could be inverted into a weapon. He made contact with vengeful spirits using Ghost Portal Mirror technology and found that many of the dead shared his contempt for the living. Together they planned what Rowan termed the Fourth Cataclysm: the wholesale destruction of civilization by an army of the undead.
Rowan secured a position as a maintenance worker at the Mercado Hotel, arranging to live in the basement. He determined that the Mercado sat on the intersection of two Ley Lines running beneath Manhattan. In the boiler room, he constructed a Barrier Compromising Master Machine designed to collapse the metaphysical boundary between the living world and the dead once the Ley Lines were sufficiently charged. To charge the lines, he fabricated a series of Hyper-Ionization Devices: miniature cyclotrons with chromium alloy hulls whose output was essentially the inverse of Gilbert and Yates' research, energizing spectral entities at a nuclear, paramolecular level.
Rowan planted these devices at locations along the Ley Lines. He visited the Aldridge Mansion Museum first, hiding a device under a dresser and ionizing the dormant spirit of Gertrude Aldridge. Next, he placed a device at the Seward Street Subway Station, inadvertently triggering a ghost encounter that was witnessed by transit worker Patty Tolan. He planted a third device at Stonebrook Theatre during Rock Revenge Fest NYC XIV, which caused the manifestation of Mayhem, a large winged ghost that the newly formed Ghostbusters subsequently trapped. Through all of this, Rowan maintained his cover at the Mercado, talking to his reflection in the boiler room mirrors and managing the spirits he had recruited, who had taken to wandering the hotel.
The Ghostbusters mapped the ghost sightings onto a city grid, identified the Ley Line pattern, traced it to the Mercado, and located Rowan. He refused to stand down. Confronted face to face in the boiler room, he explained his worldview to the Ghostbusters, then grabbed hold of two electrical pylons and electrocuted himself to death, a deliberate step in his plan. His suicide activated the master machine and he passed into the spirit world, where he used his enhanced spectral energy to briefly possess Abby Yates, then abandoned her body to possess Kevin Beckman, thanking the Ghostbusters for the "upgrade."
Using Kevin's body, Rowan reactivated the master machine, shattered the Ghost Portal Mirrors, and allowed ghosts to flood into Manhattan. Outside the Mercado, he used Kevin's appearance and a blast of psychokinetic energy to force the surrounding police officers, soldiers, and government agents to dance involuntarily, effectively neutralizing them. He then challenged the Ghostbusters directly.
When they confronted him inside the Mercado lobby, Rowan voluntarily vacated Kevin's body, deciding that Kevin's apparent lack of intelligence was making him "stupider by the second." Freed from his human vessel, he took a ghostly form and asked the Ghostbusters what shape they wanted him to assume. When Patty Tolan requested something small and cute, Rowan manifested as a giant animated version of the Ghostbusters' own No-Ghost logo, complete with a small red bow tie. The form then rapidly expanded to monstrous scale, and he burst through the Mercado and began tearing through Midtown Manhattan.
The Ghostbusters reversed the portal by crossing the streams inside the vortex, turning it into a large-scale ghost trap. The reverse polarity began pulling Rowan in, but he was powerful enough to resist, gripping buildings as ghosts streamed past him into the closing portal. To break his grip, the Ghostbusters fired on him directly. As he fell toward the portal, he grabbed Abby Yates. Erin Gilbert tied a winch cable around her waist, dived through the portal, and shot Rowan's arm, forcing him to release Abby. Rowan was pulled into the divide and vanished.
Activision Video Game (2016)
Rowan appears as both a boss on the Limbo level and the final boss of the Ghostbusters mobile and console tie-in game developed by Activision. His in-game profile (note: this text is copied directly from the game's Containment Unit entries, including the original's errors): "The girls sent his back side packing into Limbo, but he's back and his super angry. Rowan is not the kind of guy you take home to dinner, but honestly he wouldn't come come even if you asked. He's his own man... a giant ghost man."
Personality
Rowan put on a front of wry dark humor in public and managed to pass as merely odd among his co-workers. Beneath that surface was a consuming misanthropy. He regarded humanity as walking sewage, went out of his way to remind people he considered disposable of their impending doom, and took visible satisfaction in the fear and confusion his ghost encounters caused. Even in the boiler room, rehearsing his grievances in a mirror, he had a formal quality, narrating his own plan back to himself in three precise steps: "Charge the lines. Create the vortex. Break the barrier."
The exception to his contempt was a qualified respect for people he saw as fellow laborers, like Patty Tolan. He spared her a peculiar speech warning her that blue-collar workers would be "among the last led to the butchery," which functioned as a grim kind of warning rather than an insult.
Rowan was a meticulous planner. He spent an extended period mapping New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority transit system to trace Ley Line patterns, and his Hyper-Ionization Devices demonstrated real engineering competence. He could also improvise: when he realized the Ghostbusters were going to close the portal, he adapted quickly, pivoting to direct confrontation rather than retreating. His suicide was not despair but tactics.
His ghost form revealed a capacity for dark comedy. Manifesting as a cartoonish version of the No-Ghost logo before transforming it into a towering fanged monster wearing a bow tie was, on his part, a joke, though not a kind one.
Powers
As a Class 7 metaspecter, Rowan displayed a range of paranormal abilities that significantly exceeded most free-roaming ghosts:
- Possession: He fully possessed both Abby Yates and Kevin Beckman, demonstrating fine enough motor control to ride a motorcycle and operate the master machine, and could exit voluntarily.
- Psychokinetic control: He forced large groups of people to involuntarily mimic his dance movements, and moved large objects including a grand piano.
- Environmental transformation: In his ghost form, he reshaped portions of Midtown Manhattan to resemble earlier historical eras.
- Shape-shifting: He manifested as a giant humanoid figure, and briefly as the No-Ghost logo before expanding to city-block scale.
- Size alteration: His fully realized form was large enough to step on taxis and punch buildings.
- Flight and sustained manifestation: He remained a coherent presence even as the reversal portal pulled surrounding ghosts away, resisting until shot directly.
Casting and Design
Neil Casey portrayed Rowan North. Casey had previously worked with director Paul Feig on the 2015 series Other Space. He was also known for his writing work on Saturday Night Live (2012-2013) and acting roles in Inside Amy Schumer and Kroll Show. His casting as the villain was reported publicly on July 7, 2015. Casey ad-libbed Rowan's observation that the souls massing behind the mirrors were "mostly dudes."
The character's backstory went through substantial revision during development. At one point the villain was written as a real estate developer. In another draft, the character was the ghost of a murderer struck by an electrical storm during his execution by electric chair, with plans to summon the ghosts of famous dead criminals and alien poltergeists. The name "Rowan North" was itself a late-stage decision: his last name was originally Elgin. A FUNKO press release from April 6, 2016 erroneously described Rowan as "a convicted murderer who turns into a ghost after his execution is hit by a supercharged electrical storm," apparently based on an earlier draft. Paul Feig described the final character as "the ultimate loner."
MIT consultant Janet Conrad wrote an actual string theory paper for use as a prop in Rowan's room. The choice was intentional: protagonist Erin Gilbert is a neutrino theorist, and the antagonist Rowan is a string theorist, making the physics credentials on his wall a quiet in-joke.
For the visual effects of Rowan's ghost form, the team at MPC worked on approximately 250 shots. They began with his muscle and fat simulation, then layered a cloth simulation over his form to give him a sheet-like appearance that read as massive and heavy on screen. The destruction of the Mercado Hotel as Rowan burst through it used MPC's proprietary rigid body destruction tool, Kali, with particular attention to matching debris speed to Rowan's high movement speed.
During pre-visualization, the effects team used the Icon Ghost from The Real Ghostbusters as a placeholder, intending the design to evolve during production. Rowan's giant humanoid ghost form was ultimately based on the Walking Ghost seen in the opening credits sequence of The Real Ghostbusters. His No-Ghost logo manifestation was rendered with traditional hand-drawn animation. A real crushed taxi cab prop was used for the sequence where Rowan steps on a cab, filmed on Congress Street in Boston at the 53 State Exchange Place Building on the corner of Congress Street and Exchange Place; the side alley the Ghostbusters hide in is Quaker Lane.
The shot of Rowan's foot crushing the taxi was a deliberate parallel to the shot of Lady Liberty's foot crushing a police car in Ghostbusters II.
Scripting Details
At one point during scripting, Rowan's goal was to summon a dark god named Anduk. The hidden deleted scene "Rowan's Manifesto" is notable as the only scene in the film or its extended material in which Rowan says his last name, "North," aloud. In the theatrical cut, Rowan assumed that Kevin's name would be "Chet"; in the extended edition he assumed it would be something more Australian, like "Jack-O" or "Dave-O."
Rowan North is primarily known to GBFans.com collectors through his role as a Build-a-Figure in Mattel's 2016 six-inch figure line tied to the film. Collecting all four six-inch Ghostbusters figures released by Mattel in 2016 allowed the buyer to assemble a complete Rowan ghost-form figure, making him the line's centerpiece collectible. Photos of the assembled figure were first reported on February 14, 2016, and Mattel's "Pixel Dan" Eardley posted a video of a Mattel representative discussing Rowan as the film's newly revealed villain at Toy Fair 2016 on February 15, 2016.
Rowan's connection to the Real Ghostbusters visual design tradition, specifically his ghost form drawing from the RGB Walking Ghost, is a frequent point of discussion in cross-continuity threads on GBFans.com.
References
- Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016), Chapters 04, 05, 07, 08, 09, 12, 13, 14, 15
- Ghostbusters: Answer the Call (2016), Deleted Scenes: No Graffiti, Rowan's Manifesto, Mrs. Potter, Soups & Salad, The Breakup, Visine, Bring It In, So Glad You Came Back
- Ghostbusters Activision Video Game (2016)
- IDW Publishing, Ghostbusters 101 (2017), Issues 4-5
- IDW Publishing, Ghostbusters Crossing Over (2018), Issue 3
- IDW Publishing, Ghostbusters International #11
- IDW Publishing, Ghostbusters Annual 2017
