Introduction

Beetlejuice is a 1988 American gothic dark fantasy comedy horror[3][4][5] film directed by Tim Burton from a screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren based on a story by McDowell and Larry Wilson. The film stars Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara, Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton as the title character.

The first installment of the Beetlejuice franchise, the plot revolves around a recently deceased couple. As ghosts, they are not allowed to leave their house. They contact Betelgeuse,[a] a sleazy "bio-exorcist", to scare the house's new inhabitants away. The film prominently features music from Harry Belafonte's albums Calypso and Jump Up Calypso.

Beetlejuice was released in the United States on March 30, 1988, by Warner Bros. The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing $84 million on a $15 million budget. It won the Academy Award for Best Makeup and three Saturn Awards: Best Horror Film, Best Makeup and Best Supporting Actress for Sylvia Sidney. The film's success spawned an animated television series, video games and a 2018 stage musical.

A sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, had its theatrical release on September 6, 2024.[6]

Plot

In Winter River, Connecticut, Adam and Barbara Maitland spend their vacation decorating their large country home that family member (and local real estate agent) Jane Butterfield constantly pesters them to sell. Adam spends his off-time in the attic working on his hobby: building a scale model of the town. Adam tells Barbara he needs items from the hardware store they operate in town (now closed for their vacation), and she offers to accompany him. Adam collects the items, but on the drive home, the Maitlands’ car swerves to miss a dog and plunges off a bridge, into the river.

Barbara and Adam arrive home but are unable to recall how they arrived. When attempting to leave the house, Adam enters an otherworldly desert-like landscape populated by enormous sandworms. The encounter lasts mere seconds for him, but after Barbara rescues him, she claims he'd been gone for two hours. After discovering a Handbook for the Recently Deceased and noticing they have no reflections in a mirror, the couple deduce they drowned in the river and are now ghosts.

The house is sold to New York real estate developer Charles Deetz and his second wife Delia, a sculptor of questionable talent. Charles' teenage goth daughter, Lydia lives with them. Under the guidance of interior designer Otho, Delia begins renovating the house with a new-wave aesthetic of postmodern art.

While consulting the Handbook on how to remove the Deetzes from their home, the Maitlands see an advertisement on their attic television advertising the "Bio-Exorcism" services of a black-eyed, green-haired entity named Betelgeuse.

Following the handbook's guidelines, they travel to an otherworldly bureaucratic waiting room filled with other distressed souls. After navigating the afterlife's complex bureaucracy, the Maitlands return home only to realize three months have passed and the house has now been completely redesigned. Their caseworker, Juno, arrives and discloses the Maitlands must remain in their house for 125 years before "moving on". She strongly urges them to scare the Deetzes out of the house themselves without getting Betelgeuse involved, revealing that he was her assistant before going into business for himself as a "freelance bio-exorcist."

Adam and Barbara's continued invisibility to Charles and Delia thwarts their fright attempts. Lydia, however, can see them, which she attributes to her peculiar nature. In frustration, the Maitlands end up summoning Betelgeuse, and instantly find themselves transported into the model, where they meet him. Adam and Barbara find Betelgeuse's crude and morbid demeanor offensive and quickly exit the model, then plan their first "haunt".

During a dinner party, the Maitlands possess Charles, Delia, Otho and their guests: Delia's art agent and his wife and daughter. Unexpectedly, their antics only amuse the group, inspiring Charles to pitch a supernatural theme park to investor Maxie Dean. The Deetzes uncover the town model in the attic; additionally, Otho discovers the Maitlands' Handbook and steals it.

As a show of his power, Betelgeuse transforms into a giant snake and terrorizes the Deetzes before Barbara banishes him back into the town model.

Juno summons Barbara and Adam back to the afterlife office and berates them for releasing Betelgeuse. Meanwhile, Lydia – depressed and blaming the Maitlands for Betelgeuse's attack – writes a suicide note. Lydia discovers Betelgeuse inside the model. In exchange for passage to the afterlife, she almost summons him, but the Maitlands return and stop her in time.

Maxie Dean and his wife arrive, repeatedly requesting evidence of the paranormal occurrences, but the Maitlands refuse to remanifest for their amusement. Otho uses the Handbook and conducts what he believes is a séance to force the Maitlands to show themselves. He uses Adam and Barbara's wedding clothes to summon them, but shortly after they materialize in their wedding clothes, they begin rapidly aging to the point of decomposition; Otho has instead mistakenly performed an exorcism on the Maitlands, which begins to send them to "death for the dead".

In a panic to save the Maitlands before it is too late, Lydia pleads with Betelgeuse, who offers a quid pro quo: he will rescue the Maitlands if Lydia agrees to marry him, which will allow him to permanently remain in the mortal world. Lydia reluctantly agrees and invokes his name three times.

Betelgeuse saves the Maitlands, drives away the Deans and Otho, then prepares to wed Lydia. The Maitlands, slowly recovering from near-exorcism, attempt to rebanish Betelgeuse to the model. In response, Betelgeuse beats them to the punch and banishes Adam to the town model, with Barbara sent to the desert-land.

Just before the wedding ceremony concludes, Barbara smashes through the ceiling of the house on the back of a sandworm, which devours Betelgeuse.

The Deetzes and the Maitlands agree to harmoniously live together, and the Maitlands grow closer to Lydia. Betelgeuse is left in the afterlife waiting room, waiting his turn to see a caseworker. When he attempts to steal a witch doctor-ghost's numbered ticket, the latter shrinks his head in retaliation.

Cast

Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse
Alec Baldwin as Adam Maitland
Geena Davis as Barbara Maitland
Jeffrey Jones as Charles Deetz
Catherine O'Hara as Delia Deetz
Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz
Sylvia Sidney as Juno
Robert Goulet as Maxie Dean
Dick Cavett as Bernard
Glenn Shadix as Otho Fenlock
Annie McEnroe as Jane Butterfield, Sr.
Simmy Bow as Janitor
Maree Cheatham as Sarah Dean
Carmen Filpi as a run-over man employed as a messenger in the waiting room
Tony Cox as the preacher that Betelgeuse summons for his wedding with Lydia
- Jack Angel as the voice of the preacher
Susan Kellermann as Grace
Adelle Lutz as Beryl
Patrice Martinez as Miss Argentina
Rachel Mittelman as Jane Butterfield, Jr. "Little Jane"

Production

Writing

After the financial success of Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985), Burton became a "bankable" director and began working on a script for Batman with Sam Hamm. While Warner Bros. was willing to pay for the script's development, it was less willing to green-light Batman.[7] Burton had become disheartened by the lack of imagination and originality in the scripts he had been sent, particularly Hot to Trot.

Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson formed a partnership (Pecos Productions) with entertainment attorney Michael Bender, and Beetlejuice was their first original project. After developing the story, McDowell and Wilson decided they would write the first draft of the screenplay together, while Wilson would only take 'Story By' credit, as well as his 'Producer' credit.

Burton had gotten to know and worked with McDowell and Wilson (who co-wrote the script for "The Jar", an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents that Burton directed).[7] Burton read their first draft of Beetlejuice, liked it but had other projects that kept him from becoming involved at that time.

The original script is far less comedic and much darker; the Maitlands' car crash is depicted graphically, with Barbara's arm crushed and the couple screaming for help as they slowly drown.[8] A reference to this remains: Barbara remarks that her arm feels frozen upon returning home as a ghost.[9] Instead of possessing the Deetzes and forcing them to dance during dinner, the Maitlands cause a vine-patterned carpet to come to life and attack them by tangling them to their chairs.

The character of Betelgeuse—envisioned in the first draft as a winged demon who takes on the form of a short man—is also intent on killing the Deetzes rather than scaring them and wants sex from Lydia instead of marriage. In this version of the script, Betelgeuse need only be exhumed from his grave to be summoned, after which he is free to wreak havoc; he can be summoned, but not controlled, by saying his name three times and wanders the world freely, tormenting different characters in different manifestations.

In another version of the script, the film concludes with the Maitlands, Deetzes, and Otho conducting an exorcism ritual that destroys Betelgeuse, and the Maitlands transforming into miniature versions of themselves and moving into Adam's model of their home, which they refurbish to look like their house before the Deetzes moved in.

Co-author and producer Larry Wilson has talked about the reaction to the first draft by a prominent executive at Universal, where Wilson was employed at the time:

I won't name names here, but I worked at Universal Studios at the time. I was director of development for the director Walter Hill. I had a very good relationship with a very prominent executive at Universal. He liked me, and he liked what I was doing with Walter, and the material I was bringing in.

I gave him Beetlejuice to read, and I gave it to him on a Friday, and on Monday his assistant called me and said "well, he wants to meet with you". My initial reaction was "wow! He'd read it. He must have loved it or he wouldn't have wanted to see me so soon." But I went into his office, and he literally said, "what are you doing with your career?"

"This piece of weirdness, this is what you're going to go out into the world with? You're developing into a very good executive. You've got great taste in material. Why are you going to squander all that for this piece of shit" was basically what he was saying. It goes to show, right? Shortly after that, we sold it to the Geffen Company.[10]

Skaaren's rewrite shifted the film's tone, eliminating the graphic nature of the Maitlands' deaths and further developing the concept created by McDowell and Wilson that the Afterlife is a complex bureaucracy.[11] Skaaren's rewrite also added to McDowell and Wilson's depiction of the limbo that keeps Barbara and Adam trapped inside their home; in the original script, it takes the form of a massive void filled with giant clock gears that shred the fabric of time and space as they move. Skaaren had Barbara and Adam encounter different limbos every time they leave their home, including the "clock world" and the sandworm world, identified as Saturn's moon Titan. Skaaren also introduced the leitmotif of music accompanying Barbara and Adam's ghostly hijinks, although his script specified R&B tunes instead of Harry Belafonte[11] and was to have concluded with Lydia dancing to "When a Man Loves a Woman".

Skaaren's first draft retained some of McDowell's Betelgeuse's more sinister characteristics but toned the character down to make him a troublesome pervert rather than blatantly murderous. Betelgeuse's true form was that of the Middle Eastern man, and much of his dialogue was written in African-American Vernacular English. This version concluded with the Deetzes returning to New York and leaving Lydia in the care of the Maitlands, who, with Lydia's help, transform their home's exterior into a stereotypical haunted house while returning the interior to its previous state. It also featured deleted scenes such as the real estate agent, Jane, trying to convince the Deetzes to allow her to sell the house for them (having sold it to them in the first place—Charles and Delia decline) and a revelation of how Betelgeuse had died centuries earlier (he attempted to hang himself while drunk—having been rejected by a woman—only to mess it up and die slowly by choking to death rather than quickly by snapping his neck) and wound up working for Juno before striking out on his own as a "freelance bio-exorcist".

Retrospectively, McDowell was impressed with how many people made the connection between the film's title and the star Betelgeuse.[12]

Casting

Burton's original choice for Betelgeuse was Sammy Davis Jr. The producers also considered Dudley Moore and Sam Kinison for the role, but Geffen suggested Keaton. Burton was unfamiliar with Keaton's work, but was quickly convinced.[13][14] Several actresses auditioned for the role of Lydia Deetz, including Sarah Jessica Parker, Brooke Shields, Lori Loughlin, Diane Lane, Justine Bateman, Molly Ringwald, Juliette Lewis, and Jennifer Connelly.[15] Alyssa Milano was the runner-up for the role.[16] Burton cast Ryder upon seeing her in Lucas. Anjelica Huston was originally cast as Delia Deetz but dropped out because of illness.[15] O'Hara quickly signed on, while Burton claimed it took a lot of time to convince other cast members to sign, as "they didn't know what to think of the weird script".[17] Burton also felt that O'Hara and Jones would make a "cute couple".[18] Lydia Deetz was notably cast with the look and persona of the Goth subculture.[19][20][21][22]

Filming

Beetlejuice's budget was $15 million, with just $1 million given over to visual effects work. Considering the scale and scope of the effects, which included stop motion, replacement animation, prosthetic makeup, puppetry and blue screen, it was always Burton's intention to make the style similar to that of the B movies he grew up with as a child. He said that he wanted to make the effects look cheap and purposely fake-looking.[23] Burton wanted to hire Anton Furst as production designer after being impressed with his work on The Company of Wolves (1984) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), but Furst was committed to High Spirits, a choice he later regretted.[24] He hired Bo Welch, his future collaborator on Edward Scissorhands and Batman Returns. The test screenings were met with positive feedback and prompted Burton to film an epilogue featuring Betelgeuse foolishly angering a witch doctor.[25] Warner Bros. disliked the title Beetlejuice and wanted to call the film House Ghosts. As a joke, Burton suggested the name Scared Sheetless and was horrified when the studio actually considered using it.[26] While the setting is the fictional village of Winter River, Connecticut, all outdoor scenes were filmed in East Corinth, a village in the town of Corinth, Vermont.[27] Interiors were filmed at The Culver Studios in Culver City, California. Principal photography took place from March 11 to June 11, 1987.[28]

Music

The Beetlejuice soundtrack, first released in 1988 on LP, CD, and cassette tape, features most of the film's score, written and arranged by Danny Elfman. Geffen reissued the original 1988 soundtrack on vinyl in 2015, which was remastered and pressed to vinyl by Waxwork Records in 2019 for the film's 30th anniversary.[29] The soundtrack features two original recordings performed by Harry Belafonte used in the film: "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)" and "Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora)". Two other vintage Belafonte recordings that appear in the film are absent from the soundtrack: "Man Smart, Woman Smarter" and "Sweetheart from Venezuela". The soundtrack entered the Billboard 200 albums chart the week ending June 25, 1988, at No. 145, peaking two weeks later at No. 118 and spending a total of six weeks on the chart. This was after the film had already fallen out of the top 10 and before the video release in October. "Day-O" received a fair amount of airplay at the time in support of the soundtrack.

The complete score (with the Belafonte tracks included) was released in both the DVD and the Blu-ray as an isolated music track in the audio settings menu; this version of the audio track consists entirely of "clean" musical cues, uninterrupted by dialogue or sound effects.

Reception

Box office

Beetlejuice opened theatrically in the United States on March 30, 1988, earning $8,030,897 its opening weekend, which at the time, was an Easter weekend record. The film eventually grossed $75.1 million worldwide. Beetlejuice was a financial success,[30] recouping its $15 million budget and becoming the 10th-highest-grossing film of 1988.[31][32]

Critical response

Beetlejuice was met with a mostly positive response. Based on 115 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Beetlejuice holds an 83% overall approval rating with an average rating of 7/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Brilliantly bizarre and overflowing with ideas, Beetlejuice offers some of Michael Keaton's most deliciously manic work—and creepy, funny fun for the whole family."[33] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 71 out of 100, based on 19 reviews.[34] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a B on a grade scale of A to F.[35]

Pauline Kael called the film a "comedy classic".[26] Jonathan Rosenbaum called it a "creative mess" in a positive review in the Chicago Reader.[36] Desson Howe of The Washington Post felt Beetlejuice had the "perfect" balance of bizarreness, comedy and horror.[37]

Janet Maslin of The New York Times gave the film a negative review, writing that the film "tries anything and everything for effect, and only occasionally manages something marginally funny" and "is about as funny as a shrunken head".[38] Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars, writing that he "would have been more interested if the screenplay had preserved their [Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis] sweet romanticism and cut back on the slapstick". Ebert called Keaton "unrecognizable behind pounds of makeup" and said "his scenes don't seem to fit with the other action".[39]

In his book Comedy-Horror Films: A Chronological History, 1914–2008, Bruce G. Hallenbeck praised the film's lively script, assured direction, offbeat casting, and "delightfully off-kilter, Edward Gorey-like look", citing the explorer with the shrunken head and the animated sandworm as particularly memorable visuals.[40]

Accolades

At the 61st Academy Awards, Beetlejuice won the Academy Award for Best Makeup (Steve La Porte, Ve Neill, and Robert Short),[41] while the British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominated the film for Best Visual Effects and Makeup at the 42nd British Academy Film Awards.[42][43]

Beetlejuice won Best Horror Film and Best Make-up at the 1988 Saturn Awards. Sidney also won the Saturn for Best Supporting Actress, and the film received five other nominations: Direction for Burton, Writing for McDowell and Skaaren, Best Supporting Actor for Keaton, Music for Elfman, and Special Effects.[44] Beetlejuice was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.[45] Beetlejuice was 88th in the American Film Institute's list of Best Comedies.[46][47]

Sequel

A sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, produced by Brad Pitt's studio Plan B Entertainment alongside Warner Bros.,[48] with Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O'Hara reprising their roles, was released in theaters on September 6, 2024.[49]

In other media

The film's success spawned an animated television series, video games and a 2018 stage musical.

Video rental

On March 10, 1998, Beetlejuice became the first of more than 5.2 billion DVDs shipped by Netflix, which launched as a mail-based rental business.[50][51]

Beetlejuice Tim Burton