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Dr. Janosz Poha is a character in Ghostbusters II (1989), played by Peter MacNicol. An eccentric Eastern European art restorer serving as head of the Manhattan Museum of Art's restoration studio, he is a reluctant antagonist who becomes enslaved by the spirit of Vigo the Carpathian after being assigned to restore Vigo's self-portrait. He also appears in Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime and IDW Comics continuity.
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Janosz supervises Dana Barrett's work in the museum's restoration department, and she is the only restorer he does not berate for shoddy work, owing to an unrequited crush he nurses throughout the film. He routinely asks her out and is politely refused each time. When the portrait of Vigo the Carpathian is brought up from storage for a Romantic Art exhibit, Janosz takes on its restoration personally.
Working late one evening, Janosz witnesses the spirit of Vigo manifest from within the painting. Vigo fires bolts of orange energy into Janosz's eyes, knocking him from his step ladder, and commands him to find a child for his resurrection before the New Year. Vigo fires another bolt directly into Janosz's eyes when he hesitates, and Janosz settles into calm obedience, deciding that Dana's infant son Oscar would serve as the vessel.
During the city-wide blackout caused by the Ghostbusters, Janosz pays a visit to Dana's apartment under the pretense of checking on her. She turns him away at the door without letting him in; as he walks away down the hall, light beams project from his eyes.
When Peter Venkman visits Dana at work, Janosz intercepts him and is dismissive of his humor toward the Vigo painting. Later, when the full team arrives to investigate, Janosz attempts to block them but Ray Stantz sidesteps him with polite professionalism, while Peter photographs the painting and mocks Vigo's portraiture, reducing Janosz to wailing.
On New Year's Eve, Janosz strikes a deal with Vigo: he will deliver Oscar in exchange for Dana as his wife. With supernatural power granted by Vigo, Janosz takes on the spectral form of a menacing English nanny with a pram and kidnaps Oscar from the ledge outside Peter's apartment. Louis Tully witnesses the ghost nanny; Dana recognizes Janosz's face on the apparition.
When Dana pursues him to the museum, Janosz attempts to persuade her to accept life as Vigo's surrogate mother and his own wife, offering a list of benefits including "a magnificent apartment, a car, and free parking." She feigns compliance while the Ghostbusters break in overhead through the skylight dome. With Vigo absent from the painting, Janosz falters, and Ray and Winston Zeddemore thoroughly douse him with positively charged Psychomagnotheric Slime. He passes out. When he wakes, he is free of Vigo's influence and in an euphoric state, hugging Ray (who had also been doused with slime) and singing. He is last seen at the Ghostbusters' mayoral parade at Liberty Island.
Janosz appears as the penultimate boss in the Nintendo game The Real Ghostbusters Starring in Ghostbusters II. He replicates himself and the Ghostbusters must defeat him by capturing his clones.
Following the Vigo incident, Janosz is committed to Parkview Psychiatric Hospital, still coated in mood slime. At Parkview he is assigned to the same room as Ismael McEnthol, and the two become close friends. Over the years, Ismael draws Janosz into his scheme to revive the demon Dumazu. After both are discharged, Janosz uses his museum credentials to take a position at the American Museum of Natural History, steals a shard of the Relic of Nilhe on display there, and delivers it to Ismael, who promptly breaks their deal. Ismael had promised Janosz that Dumazu would give him Dana Barrett, but he reneges and returns to Parkview alone.
Janosz subsequently approaches the junior Ghostbusters team and recounts the situation. The game reveals that Janosz is the maternal uncle of Alan Crendall, though the family disowned Janosz after the Vigo incident and Alan holds him in contempt throughout the story. After Dumazu is defeated, Alan chooses to forgive his uncle and reconcile. Janosz, pleased, announces he has found the solution to his romantic difficulties: online dating.
In IDW Comics continuity, Janosz is still a patient at Parkview Psychiatric Hospital some years after the Vigo incident. He eventually begins painting again, though his work raises concerns: his depiction of the Last Supper features Ray Stantz's face on every figure. After he expresses his feelings about Peter and Ray to his psychiatrist, the doctor doubles his Thorazine dosage.
Before Christmas, the demon Idulnas visits Janosz and demands his service for a summoning ritual. Janosz refuses repeatedly, seeing through Idulnas's attempt to use Vigo's image as leverage. Idulnas escalates, threatening to kill Janosz's sister and his nephew Alan, and Janosz capitulates and allows Idulnas to possess him. While possessed, Janosz paints Gozerian Alphabet symbols on his room wall to cast a summoning spell targeting the Ghostbusters. Hospital staff, believing he has suffered a full breakdown, restrain him.
Months later, Dr. Cleese notices the symbols keep reappearing despite being painted over and contacts the Ghostbusters. Kylie Griffin schedules a consultation and questions Janosz directly; he responds "They are paying" before Idulnas reasserts control. When Kylie and the team work out that Idulnas has exploited a loophole to manipulate the Collectors, she appeals directly to Janosz. He takes back control of his own body, refusing to be used as a pawn by a supernatural being a second time, and asks Kylie for paint. He alters the summoning sigil to redirect the Collectors at Idulnas instead, neutralizing the threat. The violent extraction of Idulnas leaves his mind visibly damaged.
Even under Vigo's control, Janosz remains largely himself: an artsy, somewhat pretentious egomaniac consumed by his desire to win Dana's affections. Subtlety is not among his qualities. He speaks openly to the Vigo painting in public, argues with it, and pleads with it with apparently no awareness of how it appears to onlookers.
He has a flair for the melodramatic: when empowered by Vigo, he adopts the form of a spectral English nanny with a carriage to carry out the abduction of Oscar, and takes care to keep the baby comfortable and erect what he considers protective barriers. In an interview in Starlog magazine, Peter MacNicol described Janosz as not an evil person at all, but simply very lonely and so desperate for Dana's affections that he was easily manipulated by Vigo.
The character went through several name changes during development. Around September to November 1988, early drafts listed him as "Justin," then as "Jason Locke," an art historian and the infant's father. Dustin Hoffman was pursued for the role of this earlier version. The September 29, 1988 draft depicts Jason Locke as a Metropolitan Museum employee who witnesses Vigo transform him and then runs out forgetting to sign out at the guard desk.
Peter MacNicol received a script in which his character was a nondescript art curator named Jason. He did not see himself in the role and initially instructed his agent to decline. After reconsidering overnight, he read the script again and began envisioning Jason as Eastern European, even Carpathian, and devised the malapropisms and thick accent that would define the character. MacNicol met with director Ivan Reitman, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis, asked to take liberties with the character, and demonstrated his conception. Reitman changed the character's name to Janosz Poha.
To research the accent, MacNicol visited a Romanian tourist agency and pretended to be planning a trip to Bucharest in order to study the agent's speech. He found that accent too refined and supplemented it with the voice of a Czech friend. MacNicol also developed an extensive fictional national mythology for Carpathia: he invented the national flag (a snake stepping on a man), a national motto composed entirely of consonants because the country was too poor to afford vowels, and an economy based on firewood.
For the blackout scene at Dana's apartment, Peter MacNicol was filmed walking down a dimly lit hallway set. Cinematographer Michael Chapman then made a second pass walking the same hallway, this time holding a 2K light at MacNicol's height and panning it side to side. The two passes were edited together with Chapman and the light matted out. Visual effects technician Pat Meyers added shards and particulate matter to make the beams project convincingly from MacNicol's eyebrows to puddles of light on the walls.
For the spectral nanny sequence, MacNicol was dressed in drag and photographed in front of a bluescreen. The stretched-arm effect used a piece of tubing covered with costume fabric rigged to slide down a pole. Wider shots used a miniature rod puppet and carriage, photographed in front of a bluescreen and performed by Bob Cooper and David Allen. The ghost nanny concept itself was pitched by ILM art supervisor Harley Jessup. Other early kidnapping concepts proposed included a two-headed dragon, gargoyles coming to life, a phantom taxicab, a giant pigeon, and a horrible Santa Claus.
In the November 27, 1988 draft, the Vigo painting is described as destined for a Byzantine exhibition rather than a Romantic one, and Vigo's speech to Janosz includes additional lines referencing "twenty thousand corpses" and the "Book of Gombotz." In that draft Peter's first joke about the painting is that he would not want to hang it in his rec room, rather than the kitten quip used in the finished film.
The creators of Ghostbusters: The Video Game (2009) wanted to include Janosz Poha but dropped the idea after they were unable to secure Peter MacNicol for the voice role.