By Mr Hull's Movie Guides
Watch the Trailer
What's Inside the Guide
This is a 14-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 finding a hidden journal of documented ghosts and completing a profile form for one ghost of their own invention, including a sketch.
- An original phone call dialogue between the Ghostbusters' secretary and the caller reporting that ghost.
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.
👻 It treats grief as a mystery worth solving. Callie never knew her father, and the movie frames the farmhouse itself as a puzzle she and her kids have to work through to understand who he was. Students see grief handled through curiosity and discovery rather than through a single tearful scene, which gives the theme more room to land.
🔬 Phoebe is a confident, capable outsider. Phoebe is socially awkward but never apologizes for being exactly who she is, and her scientific mind ends up being the thing that saves the town. She stays calm and reasons her way through dangerous situations rather than panicking, which gives students a character worth discussing.
🏚️ It explores what it means to inherit more than property. The family does not just inherit a run-down house, they inherit a reputation, old debts, and a secret identity nobody warned them about. That setup gives students a concrete way into bigger questions about how much of who we are comes from people we never met.
🎃 It is built for the Halloween season without leaning on real horror. The scares are ghost-movie scares, jump moments and creature designs rather than anything meant to genuinely disturb. That makes it a comfortable pick for the weeks around Halloween when teachers want something spooky that still plays fine in a classroom.
🚜 The small town setting is a deliberate change of pace. Moving the story from Manhattan to rural Oklahoma strips away the original's city energy and replaces it with isolation, boredom, and a farmhouse that feels abandoned by time. Students get a story about kids who have to make their own excitement in a place where nothing seems to happen.
🤝 Teamwork carries the back half of the movie. Phoebe, Trevor, Podcast, and Lucky each bring something different to solving the mystery, and the movie's climax depends on all four of them working together rather than one hero saving the day alone. It gives students a clear example of how collaboration pays off when everyone's skills are different.
Age Suitability and Content
This movie is rated PG-13.
⚠️ Things to be aware of:
- One scene of supernatural violence: a character is torn in half by a creature, shown briefly and without graphic blood spray.
- Frightening ghosts and jump scares throughout, including a possessed man and woman speaking in demonic voices.
- Mild language including "hell," "damn," one use each of a mild profanity and a stronger swear word.
- A few sexual references and innuendo pitched over younger viewers' heads, including a joke about virginity.
📋 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
💙 SEL Teachers
🌟 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.
