Why is it so hard to keep fans of Ghostbusters happy? A good proportion of those who loved the original 1984 knockabout New York sci-fi classic detested the 2016, female-led reboot by Paul Feig (though many of these were focused purely on the fact the latest proton pack-sporting gang were lacking enough Y chromosomes.) Now fans have been complaining that the new movie, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, does not look funny enough.

Directed by Jason Reitman, son of the original film’s director, Ivan, Afterlife centres on a single mother and her two children who are forced to move to a ramshackle Oklahoma farmhouse after she loses her job. The property was once owned by the late Dr Egon Spengler (Harold Ramis), and it turns out he’s left various useful original Ghostbusters bits of gear hanging around behind him. By the looks of the new trailer, this starts coming in pretty handy after the town of Summerville begins experiencing a major supernatural event. Suddenly, there are mini Stay Puft Marshmellow Men and disgusting creatures from the Gozer Home for Creepy Devil Dawgs around every corner.

The tone of trailers thus far has been spooky and heavily nostalgic rather than laugh-out-loud silly, like a big screen update of Netflix’s Stranger Things, or a less horrifying take on the recent It movies. Think small-town Stephen King vibes: 18-year-old Finn Wolfhard, who starred in both of the above, is even on hand to add to the sense that something inter-dimensional is probably going to jump out of the bushes at any moment.

Perhaps fans of the original are forgetting that the 1984 Ghostbusters had its scary moments, too, with all those fiendish red-eyed hellhounds – not to mention the freaky library ghost. It wasn’t all giant marshmellow men and Slimer the gutbucket poltergeist. And if acolytes wanted funny, it is hard to understand why they didn’t take to Feig’s (OK, intermittently) laugh-out-loud effort.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife has been picking up muted criticism for its perceived lack of comic chops for more than a year now, ever since the first trailers began to emerge. Wolfhard even had to promise fans the final film would be much funnier than the promo material at one point. But will it really be? It looks more likely that Reitman is sticking to his guns here and releasing the brooding, mysterious, nostalgic ghost movie that makes sense to him. There has been more than enough time for reshoots with all the Covid-inspired delays to the film’s release, yet the latest trailer is no more comic-toned than its predecessors. Afterlife really does look like a very different style of Ghostbusters movie from those to which we’ve become accustomed.

Perhaps the problem is that we don’t yet know how much we’ll see of the remaining original Ghostbusters, Venkman (Bill Murray), Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) and Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) in the final cut. Rick Moranis, not so much comic relief as manna from speccy hilarity heaven in the original, is sadly absent despite having recently signed on to star in a new Honey I Shrunk the Kids movie (his first new film in more than two decades).

On the other hand, it makes plenty of sense to hold back the big beasts until they are really needed. And if the new Ghostbusters winds up being a bit like the old Ghostbusters if it had been written by King himself, will that really end up being such a big issue? The ghostbros who all had apoplexies in 2016 will at least be cheered that Hollywood hasn’t replaced the four horseblokes of the laughopalypse with hilarious women this time around.