Ghostbusters

Essential, and the only film here that anyone needs to have seen. It is also a much stranger object than its reputation suggests: a hundred and five minutes in which three men lose their university funding, take out a loan against a mortgage, lease a condemned firehouse, worry about cash flow, get audited by a regulator, and are at no point surprised that ghosts exist.

That deadpan is the whole technique. The supernatural is treated as a service industry with a licensing problem, the city's response is bureaucratic, and the one character who takes any of it seriously is the villain from the Environmental Protection Agency. Ivan Reitman shot it like a workplace comedy and let the effects happen in the background of scenes about invoicing.

What reached the screen is a fraction of what was written. Dan Aykroyd's original treatment ranged across time periods and dimensions with teams of Ghostbusters operating worldwide, and Harold Ramis spent months compressing it into one city and three men with a loan. Aykroyd had written Venkman for John Belushi, who died in 1982, and Bill Murray's version of the part is a different thing entirely: a man who is not frightened because he is not paying attention.

The practical effects, optical compositing, stop motion, puppets and a great deal of smoke, have aged into a specific texture that none of the sequels can reproduce because none of them were made that way. Everything after this is a response to it, and nothing after it is necessary.