Beetlejuice (1988)

Poster Description: “In This House…If You’ve Seen One Ghost…You Haven’t Seen Them All.” Michael Keaton is Beetlejuice “The Name In Laughter From The Hereafter.”

A dark sky has a crescent moon. Barbara (Davis) grins in her wedding dress, her hand on Betelgeuse’s shoulder. Wearing a crumpled black and white suit, he sits on the house, arms outstretched, with a manic grin. He holds Adam’s smiling head (Baldwin), whose body wears a suit with a red bowtie and frilled shirt. His scary face looms and numerous small figures from the afterlife stand around like dolls. The Deetz family walks up a winding road, their poses amazed. Lydia wears her red wedding gown.

 Call it ironic, but back in the days when I regularly painted my nails black and wore fingerless gloves, horror was a genre I tried to avoid. The feelings of dread, tension and excessive jump scares triggered my startle-reflex (one of the many joys of living with cerebral palsy). However, one of the few “horror” films I could withstand was Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice.

Following a freak car accident, young couple Adam and Barbara (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are trapped as ghosts in their home. Then a ridiculous family moves in, and after many attempts to scare them away, they resort to hiring a lecherous “bio-exorcist” to drive them out. All they have to do is say his name three times.

(So try not to read this out loud, eh?)

I developed an instant crush on this film by its score alone. It’s bouncy, ominous, and screams Danny Elfman loudly and proudly. Adam and Barbara are established as content and happy, spending their vacation decorating their colossal house and building the model of their little town. They listen to calypso music (ooh, such foreshadowing) and give each other thoughtful presents. It gives the impression the cute pair are still in their honeymoon period because Baldwin and Davis have sweet, believable chemistry. As annoying as they may be, it makes their characters’ deaths more devastating. Judging by that dog’s reaction and the suspiciously pristine appearance of the bridge’s shelter, one can’t help but wonder…just how many accidents has this canine caused?

Beetlejuice is a fun showcase of practical effects. Whenever they try to leave home, Adam and Barbara wind up in a strange, yellow desert crawling with stop-motion sandworms. Later, they alter their faces in ways that are horrific and hilarious in a bid to scare the mortals away. 

I can’t wait to describe this one!

Image Description: Illuminated by green light flooding through a brick door behind them, Barbara and Adam have drastically transformed their faces. Adam’s nose is elongated like a bird’s beak, his empty eye sockets pulled down. A hand seems to have reached out of his head from inside his skull. Barbara’s face is a long, screaming maw full of human teeth and flapping tongue. Her eyes sit at the back of her throat.

Warming their cold hands by the fire, Barbara sets fire to fingers with a decidedly waxy look about them (!) Best of all, after following the convoluted instructions set out by  The Handbook for the Recently Deceased, the couple finds themselves in a waiting room full of miserable souls. We immediately know how all of them died through incredible make-up and prosthetics. Saying that, while I would have liked the idea of Adam and Barbara dripping water everywhere they walked, it would have affected the film’s flow. Sylvia Sidney plays their case worker, Juno. She features too briefly, but her performance as a jaded, chain-smoking civil servant made me desperate for some kind of weird, bureaucratic afterlife spin-off.

 

Image Description: Barbara looks down awkwardly, avoiding eye contact with the man with the shrunken head beside her.

It's hard to believe the same guy who would go on to play Bruce Wayne – frickin’ Batman! – takes on the title role. Beneath Ve Neill’s outstanding make-up, Michael Keaton is having the best time as a…what is he? A ghoul? A demon? He certainly has the, er, appetites for one, which is incredibly problematic, but he’s still wildly entertaining to watch. You want to hate him, but our boy just wants out, back into the human world, and doesn’t care how it happens. It’s admirable, really. The moment he shows Barbara and Adam his scary face is one of my favourite gags. As with many of them, it is so fast and unexpected, with Keaton turning away from the camera, so we rely on Baldwin and Davis’s horrified reactions as feelers and a distorted scream burst out of Betelgeuse – what did they see? That’s up to our imagination.

 

GIF Description: Wearing a filthy striped suit, Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) waggles his eyebrows, grins, and tilts his shaggy head. He lifts his arms out, miming “It’s showtime!” above white subtitles. Lightning flashes in the cemetery behind him.

But why do Adam and Barbara want his help so badly? The Deetz family is pretty awful. Charles (Jeffrey Jones,  Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) and Delia (Catherine O’Hara, walking so Moira Rose could run here) turn the house into her bizarre art exhibition. Sure, the wallpaper was terrible before, but it ends up looking like a nightmare. We’re supposed to be on the side of Adam and Barbara, but Delia’s hysterical line, “I will go insane and take you with me!” is too good to scoff over. O’Hara makes her desperation funny and easy to understand with such pompous “friends.”

 

Indeed, I could not write about Beetlejuice without mentioning the infamous possession scene. In theory, it’s weird enough: Adam and Barbara force a dinner party of stuck-up city folk to lip-sync and dance along to Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat song before the shrimp starter attacks. In practice, it’s just as wild as it sounds, and the actors make it believable, appearing bewildered at first while fighting how much they enjoy it! I reserve my annoyance for Glenn Shadix’s Otho because the character’s motives are so unclear. Where did he come from? Besides through the window that one time.

 

In her breakout role, Winona Ryder plays Goth teen Lydia. Proclaiming to be “strange and unusual,” Lydia befriends Adam and Barbara. She was something of a style icon for my younger self based on wearing nothing but black (with one exception) and uttering such lines as “my life is a dark room.” It’s easy for adults to scorn Lydia’s wish to die and join her new pals; perhaps there should have been more disdain from her stepmother, but her parents are surprisingly resigned about her morbid behaviour! They really don’t care.

 

Image Description: Lydia (Winona Ryder) holds a camera under her chin on a lawn. She is pale with large bags under her eyes, wearing a black sunhat with a wide brim and chin strap. Her black dress has rolled up sleeves to her elbows, and her fringe has been gelled into three spikes against her forehead. Lydia looks up, somewhat shocked and confused.

In a twist that isn’t explained, for Betelgeuse to get back into the mortal realm, he must…marry Lydia. Who is underage. And does not consent. Yes, it raises the stakes for Adam and Barbara to stop him, but it has already been established that Betelgeuse is a sex maniac. This horror is altogether glossed over with Beetleguesebriefly possessing Lydia during the wedding ceremony, because, hey! It’s a comedy film. I still felt awful for laughing! Worst still, in the Beetlejuice animated series, he and Lydia are friends!

With Tim Burton’s signature aesthetic, a quirky script, and incredible practical effects, Beetlejuice is a gentle step into the scary genre. Keaton walks a precarious line between despicable and compelling, balanced out by Baldwin and Davis’s warm chemistry with Ryder. The hints at a bigger universe within the afterlife remain the most intriguing part. 

My Verdict: 3.5 STARS OUT OF 5

 My Sources:

Beetlejuice film poster: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beetlejuice

Image – Barbara and Adam’s attempt to scare off mortals: https://itsastampede.com/2021/07/22/best-beetlejuice-movie-quotes/

Image – Barbara meets a fellow soul in the afterlife: https://nerdist.com/article/beetlejuice-30-anniversary-waiting-room-character-worst-afterlife/

GIF – Beetlejuice is triumphant: https://giphy.com/explore/beetlejuice

Jeffrey Jones’ filmography: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000470/

Catherine O’Hara’s filmography: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001573/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0

Image – Lydia and her camera: https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/chosen-one-of-the-day-lydia-deetz-and-her-spectacular-bangs