Working With Fake Slime Sounds Awful, According To The Ghostbusters

Remember when you were a little kid and the idea of getting slimed sounded like so much fun? Maybe you even tried to make some slime yourself and threw it at your friends in slime wars that always ended up with someone getting the stuff in their eye and running away crying. Well, it actually turns out that getting slimed by a slime professional (also known as a film production designer) is not so great, especially if you’re a grown ass adult. The cast of the new Ghostbusters film recently shared their thoughts on the gooey stuff.

MELISSA MCCARTHY: You can’t move once it’s sprayed because it’s so slippery that [the crew] had to put towels down so you could walk. But as you try to wash it off, it regenerates. So the more you try to wash it off, the slippier it becomes.LESLIE JONES: It’s terrible. So awful. It multiplies. It’s like that slime stuff they used to sell in a little jar.MCCARTHY: But it has a viscosity as you touch it, like the hair goop from the ‘80s.KRISTEN WIIG: With a little bit of mucus.MCCARTHY: And a whisper of vomit.

Yeah, I definitely think being a grown ass adult is the barrier to entry here. Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kristen Wiig spoke to Entertainment Weekly about what it was like to actually be slimed on set for the film, and, clearly, they were not fans of the experience.

It seems that Ghostbusters director Paul Feig needed the green globby stuff to do several different things on camera for the film. So, aside from basic slime (never thought I’d type that phrase) there had to be multiple types of slime that could act in different ways depending on the scene in question. Apparently, it took months to make up enough batches of the corn syrup and glycerine concoction to get specific properties out of the slime. They had to have it do things like splatter, stick, glide, ooze, squirt and drip. Yeah, none of that sounds like any fun to me at all.

Seeing as how most people, even in this advanced day and age, have never had the dubious pleasure of being slimed, I like how the cast of Ghostbusters was nice enough to compare slime to as many things that us regular folks know about as possible. Let’s see, according to the ladies, it’s like "hair goop from the ‘80s," mucus and "a whisper" of vomit. So, I’m sure we can all understand why kids love the stuff. That’s basically 80 percent of their favorite things.

Well, you can check out the slime for yourself when Ghostbusters hits theaters on July 15.

Adrienne Jones
Senior Content Creator

Covering The Witcher, Outlander, Virgin River, Sweet Magnolias and a slew of other streaming shows, Adrienne Jones is a Senior Content Producer at CinemaBlend, and started in the fall of 2015. In addition to writing and editing stories on a variety of different topics, she also spends her work days trying to find new ways to write about the many romantic entanglements that fictional characters find themselves in on TV shows. She graduated from Mizzou with a degree in Photojournalism.