Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis play Barbara and Adam Maitland – a young married couple who die in a car accident and return to their beautiful old house in the small New England town of Winter River, Connecticut, as ghosts.
As the couple struggles to adjust to the afterlife and wade through the Handbook for the Newly Deceased, their home is sold to a family from New York.
Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) plans for a quiet life in the country, at least until he buys up the entire town for his boss. Delia (Catherine O’Hara) wants to redecorate and turn the place into an art centre, and their daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) is a weird little Goth who just wants to take photos in peace, preferably far away from either of her parents.
It’s Lydia who makes first contact with the Maitlands, and she’s far too cool to be scared by ghosts. She is, after all, Winona Ryder. “I myself am strange and unusual,” claims Lydia, and indeed, she’s a lot more alarming-looking than either of the resident ghosts, with her short, spiky bangs and entirely black wardrobe.
The Maitlands try to scare the Deetzes away, but their efforts fall short. Their somewhat sweet, all-out attempt – possessing Delia and her dinner-party guests and forcing them to dance to Harry Belafonte’s Day-O (before their shrimp dinners jump off their plates and latch onto their faces) – goes wrong because it’s so much better than the hosts’ usual dinner parties.
In desperation, Barbara and Adam eventually call on another dead guy, “bio-exterminator” Beetlejuice (a nicely off-kilter performance by the impressively versatile Michael Keaton) – a troublemaking demon who specialises in getting rid of unwanted humans.
This turns out to be a mistake. Beetlejuice has none of the Maitlands’ restraint and delights in terrifying the humans. Even Lydia is freaked out when he appears, needle-toothed, on a giant rattlesnake’s body.
Beetlejuice is a huckster, a weirdo, and a psycho, with crazy hair and patches of green mould growing all over his pasty face. He can shapeshift at will and play malevolent tricks on the living and the dead, and he enjoys that almost as much as he enjoys visiting undead brothels (‘Dante’s Inferno Room’) or kicking back with a cold drink of a kind that we shouldn’t inquire about too closely.
Complications and chaos ensue when Betelgeuse decides he wants to marry Lydia and stay in the world of the living forever.
Beetlejuice tries to persuade Lydia to marry him in exchange for his help with the Maitlands, but they rescue her from his clutches before she’s united with the mouldy ghost for good.
And the Deetzes, chastened by their contact with the undead, allow the Maitlands to restore the house and essentially adopt Lydia.
It’s a surprisingly happy ending, given all the movie’s disturbing jokes about suicide and portrayal of an afterlife full of people cursed to remain in very much the situation in which they were killed.
Despite (or, more likely, because of) all the weirdness, Beetlejuice was a commercial success, earning an Oscar for Best Makeup and helping turn Michael Keaton into a major star.
So many of Tim Burton’s preoccupations are already present that Beetlejuice seems like a distillation of all his later work.
There are the monstrous machines that transform the house, and a Danny Elfman score that’s heavy on French horn and tuba.
There are Michael Keaton, and Winona Ryder, and a sufficiently large selection of carousels and insects and eyeballs to creep anyone out.
The afterlife, in this incarnation, is full of blue and green pinup girls with pink hair, dark shadowed eyes, and scars on their wrists. In the waiting room of the dead, a bisected girl sits next to a man with a shrunken head and a charred corpse.
From 1989 to 1991, Burton’s strange world of the dead lived on as an animated series, also titled Beetlejuice. In it, Lydia and Betelgeuse inexplicably became friends, taking part in adventures in the worlds of both the living and the dead.
Betelgeuse Michael Keaton
Adam Maitland
Alec Baldwin
Barbara Maitland
Geena Davis
Delia Deitz
Catherine O’Hara
Charles Deitz
Jeffrey Jones
Lydia Deitz
Winona Ryder
Ernie
Maurice Page
Old Bill
Hugo Stanger
Little Jane Butterfield
Rachel Mittelman
Otho
Glenn Shadix
Juno
Sylvia Sidney
Maxie Dean
Robert Goulet
Bernard
Dick Cavett
Grace
Susan Kellerman
Beryl
Adelle Lutz
Sarah Dean
Maree Cheatham
This turns out to be a mistake. Beetlejuice has none of the Maitlands’ restraint and delights in terrifying the humans. Even Lydia is freaked out when he appears, needle-toothed, on a giant rattlesnake’s body.
So many of Tim Burton’s preoccupations are already present that Beetlejuice seems like a distillation of all his later work.
