By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 15-page classroom-ready resource.
Three differentiated sets of chronological comprehension questions. Answer keys are included for all three sets.
- 50 question set requiring full sentence answers.
- Shorter 30-question version pulled from the same set.
- 30 multiple choice question set with three answer options each.
- A 9-scene storyboard of what they consider the movie's most important moments, with a brief description for each scene.
- A synopsis of the movie, written using that storyboard as the basis.
This part covers two activities.
- Imagining they are interns at the Ghostbusters' headquarters documenting newly captured ghosts, completing a profile of the most recent one with prompts and a drawing.
- A junior reporter article about the phenomenon at the headquarters, including quotes from Louis about his own experience.
Why Watch This Movie With Your Students
Here's what your students naturally take away from the movie, whether through themes, values, ideas, or perspectives.
🔬 The scientists are the heroes. The team wins through research, invention, and problem solving rather than muscle, and the story treats their expertise as the thing that saves the city. In a genre where heroes usually carry superpowers, students get a blockbuster where knowing things is the advantage, which is a different kind of hero to talk about.
😂 It balances comedy and scares deliberately. The movie moves constantly between genuine frights, like the library ghost and the possession scenes, and jokes that undercut the tension before it becomes too much. Students get a clear, watchable example of tone control, how a story can be scary and funny at the same time without either side collapsing.
🤝 Teamwork carries the story from start to finish. Each Ghostbuster brings something different, Egon's expertise, Ray's enthusiasm, Peter's front-man confidence, and Winston's level-headed outsider perspective. The climax literally depends on all of them firing together, making collaboration the visible mechanism of the ending rather than a background theme.
🏢 It is secretly a movie about starting a business. The team loses their funding, takes out a loan, buys a building, converts an old ambulance, hires staff, and struggles until demand arrives. That small business thread gives the fantasy premise a grounded, recognizable structure students can follow and discuss.
🎬 Its effects are a piece of movie history. Made before computer generated imagery, the movie's ghosts were built through a mix of practical rigging, optical compositing, rotoscoping, and puppetry, with some shots taking weeks to produce a single second of footage. Students watching it today see how filmmakers created convincing supernatural images entirely by hand, without any digital effects.
🎃 It is a Halloween pick built on fun rather than fear. Ghosts, possession, and an apocalyptic god make it unmistakably seasonal, but the movie plays its supernatural threat with a wink, capped by a giant marshmallow mascot as the final monster. It suits older classes that want something spooky for late October without sitting through actual horror.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG-13.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- Some frightening ghost scenes, including a possession scene and demonic dog creatures.
- Some sexual innuendo, including one brief implied sexual dream scene and dated flirtatious behavior played for laughs.
- Moderate language, including repeated uses of one profanity.
- Characters casually smoke and drink.
📋 A free editable parent permission slip is available for this movie. It explains the educational benefits of watching movies in class and includes a space for parental consent. → Download Free Permission Slip on TpT (Free resource)
Note for educators: Movie details and age ratings in this post are sourced from IMDb, Common Sense Media, and Wikipedia to help ensure accuracy.
How My Movie Guide Helps You Teach It
Click your subject below to see how this guide supports it:
📚 English Language Arts Teachers
🗣️ ESL and ELL Teachers
🎬 Substitute Teachers and Cover Lessons
🏠 Homeschool Parents
🌟 Supporting All Learners A movie gives students a story to follow, and the guide gives them questions to work through as they watch. For students with autism, learning difficulties, and mild to severe disabilities, that combination provides a clear focus for the lesson and a concrete way to show understanding. The format can be useful in special education and learning support classrooms, where teachers need activities that give students a defined task during viewing. Find out more about why movies work for diverse learners.
How These Guides Work: From Movie to Lesson
Watching a movie is not a break from learning. It reaches students through sight, sound, and story at once, engaging the brain in ways text alone does not, and the structured work around it is what turns the viewing into a genuine lesson. You can read the research behind this on the Why Movies Work page.
- A Teacher Notes and General Directions page opens the guide with a brief overview of everything inside: what the movie is about, then each part of the guide in order with a short description of what it entails. You know what to expect from the whole resource before you hand out a single page, so you can pick up the guide cold and teach it the same day.
- Answer keys are included for the comprehension question sets, so grading is quick and you are not rewatching the movie to check answers. Some guides also include example answers for the creative and written activities.
- Print and go: classroom ready, with no additional preparation needed. Print one the morning you need it and the lesson is ready.
- Substitute and first-timer friendly. A guide can be handed to a substitute or picked up by a teacher covering the topic for the first time. Nobody running the session needs to have seen the movie.
- Differentiated comprehension sets. Most guides include two or three question sets at different difficulty levels, and most include a multiple-choice option that works well for ESL and ELL students. One class set covers your strongest readers, your strugglers, and your language learners without separate prep.
- Activities that go beyond recall. Each guide includes structured activities that ask students to engage with the movie, not just watch it, ranging from creative and written tasks to discussion and critical thinking questions depending on the guide. That variety matters in a mixed classroom: a student who freezes on a written question set may show real understanding through a drawing or a creative task, and a confident writer gets room to go beyond recall. For the teacher, it turns a movie session into work you can grade: comprehension questions show whether students followed the plot, and the activities beyond them show whether they understood it.
