Beetlejuice

Beetlejuice is a 1988 American fantasy horror comedy film directed by Tim Burton, written by Michael McDowell, Warren Skaaren, and Larry Wilson, produced by The Geffen Company, distributed by Warner Bros., and starring Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara, Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton as the title character. The plot revolves around a recently deceased couple who, as ghosts haunting their former home, contact Beetlejuice, an obnoxious and devious "bio-exorcist" from the Netherworld, to scare the home's new inhabitants away.
Beetlejuice was a critical and commercial success, grossing $74.7 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 was officially announced on May 10, 2023, with a theatrical release date of September 6, 2024.
Plot
In Winter River, Connecticut, Barbara and Adam Maitland decide to spend their vacation decorating their idyllic country home. As they are driving home from a trip to town, Barbara swerves to avoid a dog, and the car plunges into the river. After returning home, she and Adam notice they now lack reflections and find a Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
They begin to suspect they did not survive the car accident. When Adam attempts to leave the house, he ends up in a strange and otherworldly desert-like landscape populated by enormous "sandworms". The encounter lasts only a few seconds for him, but after Barbara rescues him, she says he was gone for two hours.
The house is sold, and the new owners, the Deetz family, arrive from New York City. Charles Deetz is a former real estate developer; his second wife, Delia, is a self-proclaimed sculptor; and his teenage goth daughter, Lydia, from his first marriage, is an aspiring photographer. Under the guidance of interior designer Otho, the family transforms the house into a new-wave work of postmodern art.
Consulting the Handbook, the Maitlands travel to an otherworldly waiting room populated by other distressed souls, where they discover the afterlife is structured according to a complex bureaucracy involving vouchers and caseworkers. The Maitlands' caseworker, Juno, tells them they must remain in the house for the next 125 years on pain of a dire fate. If they want the Deetzes out of the house, it is up to the Maitlands to scare them away.
Adam and Barbara are invisible to Charles and Delia, but Lydia can see the ghost couple and befriends them. Against Juno's advice, the Maitlands contact the miscreant Beetlejuice, Juno's former assistant and a now freelance "bio-exorcist", to scare the Deetzes away.
But Beetlejuice quickly offends the Maitlands with his crude and morbid demeanor: they reconsider hiring him, though too late to stop him from wreaking havoc on the Deetzes. The small town's charm and the supernatural events inspire Charles to pitch his boss, Maxie Dean, on transforming the town into a tourist hot spot, but Maxie wants proof of the ghosts. Using the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, Otho conducts what he thinks is a séance and summons Adam and Barbara, using their wedding clothes, but they begin to age and decay, as Otho unwittingly performed an exorcism instead.
Horrified, Lydia summons Beetlejuice for help, but he will help her only on the condition that she marry him, enabling him to freely cause chaos in the mortal world. He saves the Maitlands and disposes of Maxie, his wife, and Otho, then prepares a wedding before a ghastly minister. The Maitlands intervene before the ceremony is completed, with Barbara riding a sandworm through the house to devour Beetlejuice.
Finally, the Deetzes and Maitlands agree to live in harmony within the house. Beetlejuice is stuck in the afterlife waiting room. He steals a number ticket from a witch doctor, who shrinks his head in return.
Cast
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. Burton had become disheartened by the lack of imagination and originality in the scripts he had been sent, particularly Hot to Trot. David Geffen handed Burton the script for Beetlejuice, by Michael McDowell (who wrote the script for "The Jar", an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents Burton directed).
Larry Wilson was brought on board to continue rewriting work with McDowell, though Burton replaced McDowell and Wilson with Skaaren due to creative differences. McDowell's 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. A reference to this remains: Barbara remarks that her arm feels frozen upon returning home as a ghost. 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 by McDowell as a winged demon, who takes on the form of a short Middle Eastern man—is also intent on killing the Deetzes rather than scaring them, and wanted 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 cannot be summoned or controlled by saying his name three times, and wanders the world freely, appearing to torment different characters in different manifestations. McDowell's script also featured a second Deetz child, nine-year-old Cathy, the only person able to see the Maitlands and the subject of Betelgeuse's homicidal wrath in the film's climax, during which he mutilates her in the form of a rabid squirrel before revealing his true form.
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 negative reaction to McDowell's original script at Universal where he was employed at the time:
Skaaren's rewrite drastically shifted the film's tone, eliminating the graphic nature of the Maitlands' deaths while depicting the afterlife as a complex bureaucracy. Skaaren's rewrite also altered McDowell's depiction of the limbo that keeps Barbara and Adam trapped inside their home; in McDowell's 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 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 Beetlejuice 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 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 at how many people made the connection between the film's title and the star Betelgeuse. He added that the writers and producers had received a suggestion the sequel be named Sanduleak -69 202 after the former star of SN 1987A.
Casting
Burton's original choice for Beetlejuice 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. 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. Alyssa Milano was the runner-up for the role. Burton cast Ryder upon seeing her in Lucas. Anjelica Huston was originally cast as Delia Deetz but dropped out because of illness. 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".
Filming
Beetlejuices 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 the B movies he grew up with as a child. "I wanted to make them look cheap and purposely fake-looking", he said. 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. 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. 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. 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. Interiors were filmed at The Culver Studios in Culver City, California. Principal photography took place from March 11 to June 11, 1987.
Soundtrack
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. 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. The film eventually grossed $74,664,632 in North America. Beetlejuice was a financial success, recouping its $15 million budget, and the 10th-highest grossing film of 1988.
Critical response
Beetlejuice was met with a mostly positive response. Based on reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Beetlejuice received an overall approval rating with a weighted average of . 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." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 70 out of 100, based on 18 reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film a B on a grade scale of A to F.
Pauline Kael called the film a "comedy classic", while Jonathan Rosenbaum of Chicago Reader gave a highly positive review. Rosenbaum felt Beetlejuice had originality and creativity absent from other films. Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a farce for our time" and wished Keaton had more screen time. Desson Howe of The Washington Post felt Beetlejuice had "the perfect balance of bizarreness, comedy and horror".
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". 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".
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.
Accolades
At the 61st Academy Awards, Beetlejuice won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, (Steve La Porte, Ve Neill and Robert Short), 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.
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. Beetlejuice was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. Beetlejuice was 88th in the American Film Institute's list of Best Comedies.
Sequel
In February 2022, a sequel produced by Brad Pitt's studio Plan B Entertainment alongside Warner Bros. was reported to be in development.
In other media
Animated series
Due to the film's financial success, a Beetlejuice animated television series was created for ABC. The series ran for four seasons (the final season airing on Fox), from September 9, 1989, to December 6, 1991. Burton served as the show's developer and executive producer.
The character of Beetlejuice was later prominently featured in the Teen Titans Go! episode "Ghost with the Most", which aired in October 2020 as part of the show's sixth season. In this appearance, he was voiced by Alex Brightman, reprising his role from the Broadway musical.
Video games
Adventures of Beetlejuice: Skeletons in the Closet is a video game released for MS-DOS in 1990.
Beetlejuice is a video game developed by Rare and released for the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1991.
Beetlejuice: Horrific Hijinx from the Neitherworld! is a video game created by Rare and published by LJN for the Nintendo Game Boy. It is based on the animated series.
A Beetlejuice-themed fun pack for the toys-to-life video game Lego Dimensions was released on September 12, 2017. The pack includes a Beetlejuice minifigure and constructable Saturn's Sandworm, and adds a Beetlejuice-themed open-world area and battle arena to the game. In the Beetlejuice-themed open-world area, Beetlejuice is voiced by Christopher Swindle, Adam Maitland is voiced by Jeff Shine, Barbara Maitland and Delia Dietz are voiced by Krizia Bajos, and Harry the Head-Shrunken Hunter is voiced by Tom Kane. Beetlejuice also features prominently in an episode of Teen Titans Go! included as part of the game. In the Teen Titans Go! episode, when the Titans travel to the Lego world, Raven summons Beetlejuice by saying his name three times and gets to go to the Beetlejuice world. Beetlejuice says if Raven wants to win the Lego building competition, she should resort to cheating and use magic, but tricks her into making a giant gargoyle that the Titans have to fight.
Stage musical
In 2016, work began on a Broadway stage musical adaptation of the film directed by Alex Timbers, produced by Warner Bros., with music and lyrics by Eddie Perfect and book by Scott Brown and Anthony King. The musical was debuted by readings starring Christopher Fitzgerald, Kris Kukul (musical director), and Connor Gallagher (choreographer). It premiered at the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. for a limited run from October 14 to November 18, 2018, with Alex Brightman in the title role.
In December 2019, it was announced that the production would play its final performance at the Winter Garden on June 6, 2020. The producers were unable to find another theater to house the show due to the COVID Broadway shutdown in March 2020. The show reopened at the Marquis Theatre on April 8, 2022, and closed on January 8, 2023, at a financial loss, having been unable to recoup its $21 million investment. Subsequent productions opened across the world, including a North American national tour.
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.
See also
List of ghost films
References
External links
Official site for Beetlejuice's Rock and Roll Graveyard Revue
1988 films
1988 black comedy films
1988 comedy horror films
1988 fantasy films
1988 soundtrack albums
1980s American films
1980s English-language films
1980s fantasy comedy films
1980s ghost films
American black comedy films
American comedy horror films
American dark fantasy films
American fantasy comedy films
American haunted house films
Films about the afterlife
Films about exorcism
Films adapted into plays
Films adapted into television shows
Films directed by Tim Burton
Films scored by Danny Elfman
Films set in Connecticut
Films set in country houses
Films shot in Vermont
Films that won the Academy Award for Best Makeup
Films using stop-motion animation
Films with screenplays by Larry Wilson (screenwriter)
Films with screenplays by Warren Skaaren
The Geffen Film Company films
Titan (moon) in film
Warner Bros. films