WANT TO HAUNT YOUR HOUSE? FIRST, CHECK THE USER’S MANUAL.
In Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are the cutest young married couple you’ll ever meet. It’s too bad they’re dead. Actually, they’re quite alive at the very beginning of the film, lovingly settling into a Norman Rockwell–esque Connecticut farmhouse and planning on spending an idyllic lifetime there. However, in swerving to miss a meandering puppy while crossing a picturesque covered bridge, they plunge their car upside down into a creek. Returning home, they can’t remember escaping the car or even the walk back. Then things get really strange. Visitors can’t see them. And the truth slowly dawns: they have joined the ranks of the recently deceased and have no idea how to navigate the territory, much less haunt a house.
To their horror, their real estate agent sells the home to an obnoxious nouveau riche New York couple, Charles and Delia Deetz (Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara), who promptly start steaming off the homey wallpaper and adding trendy postmodern ornamentation everywhere. Their I-was-a-teenage-goth daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), is far more attuned to the house’s supernatural frequencies than her parents, and soon is making friends with the former residents/current hangers-on.
Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse
Being dead is a lot like going to the DMV, it turns out. You don’t do anything but wait and wait and try to make sense of all the rules and regulations spelled out in a thick manual for the recently departed. Adam and Barbara can’t be bothered with the hassle, and instead they summon the services of a “bio-exorcist” who advertises on ghost television, offering to expel the pesky living from the lives of the dead. His name is Betelgeuse, pronounced “Beetlejuice,” and he is an even more obnoxious character than the interlopers at the house: loud, wheedling, conniving, obviously untrustworthy, apparently sociopathic, and definitely lecherous. He frankly looks like a demon clown who couldn’t be bothered to finish applying his makeup. Keaton’s performance doesn’t seem totally coherent—composed of too many arbitrary tics and twitches—but then, he’s playing a character that doesn’t really want to be figured out. Nonetheless, Keaton is always a pleasure to watch, if only to anticipate or be surprised by his next out-of-left-field acting trick.
Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as Adam and Barbara
One of Betelgeuse’s more outlandish materializations
In any event, Betelgeuse puts on quite a spooky show for the Deetzes, but instead of being frightened away, the relentlessly materialistic owners strike on the idea of buying up all the town’s real estate and turning everything into one big haunted theme park. From there it’s a wild ride to the finish, and not at all clear which side will win. Will crass property development triumph, as it always seems to do in life? Or is there a way the living and the dead can finally make peace with each other and coexist in separate but equal dimensions?
Beetlejuice is not a film to be taken seriously on any plane, but it can be enjoyed on a multiplicity of levels. There is frequently more than one kind of humor on display at any moment, and your involuntary smile barely has a chance to stop. Burton aficionados will recognize any number of visual ideas that are wrapped into his later work, especially The Nightmare Before Christmas. Baldwin and Davis anchor the film wonderfully as warm and appealing characters who just want to keep their relationship normal, whether they’re alive or not, and no matter what kind of awful, cartoony goings-on are thrown at them. They’re especially fun to watch as they tug and stretch their ectoplasmic faces like taffy, trying to fashion themselves into frightening apparitions but failing, because in the final analysis they’re just too darn nice.
Adam’s unsuccessful attempt at a haunting
The marriage of Betelgeuse and Lydia
The possibility of a sequel to Beetlejuice has been kicked around since 1990, when Burton commissioned a script by Jonathan Gems called Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, but the project stalled with the director’s involvement in Batman Returns (1992). Seth Grahame-Smith was hired by Warner Bros. in 2011 to pursue a different sequel, this one set twenty-seven years after the original story. Winona Ryder was especially keen to play a grown-up Lydia, but no commitments were announced by other original cast members. After a flurry of script rewriting in 2017, nothing concrete materialized, and in early 2019 Warner Bros. seemed to officially give the project its own manual for the recently deceased, but later in the year resurrection rumors began to resurface. Following a Washington, D.C., tryout, a musical adaptation of the original film opened in April 2019 at New York’s Winter Garden Theater on Broadway for a limited seven-month run.
If you enjoyed Beetlejuice (1988), you might also like:
SLEEPY HOLLOW
PARAMOUNT, 1999
Tim Burton pulls out all the stops in this big-screen, big-budget extravaganza inspired by Washington Irving’s classic tale “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” about Ichabod Crane’s fateful All Hallows’ Eve encounter with the Headless Horseman. In Burton’s telling, there are many more than one headless character; as the film’s advertising tagline promised, “HEADS WILL ROLL,” and indeed they do. As played by Johnny Depp, Crane is no longer a gawky Hudson Valley schoolmaster but a New York City constable called up the river to investigate a series of beheadings that may involve a supernatural Hessian horseman in search of his own head. This is an especially good choice for Halloween viewing, given the source material. A remarkable special-effect scene near the end, in which one of the characters convincingly self-decapitates on camera, is reason alone for a second viewing, or at the very least a rewind.
Christopher Walken as the Hessian horseman in Sleepy Hollow