Beetlejuice is a 1988 American gothic comedy horror 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 Michael Keaton as Betelgeuse, along with Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Jeffrey Jones, Catherine O'Hara and Winona Ryder.
The plot revolves around Adam and Barbara Maitland, a recently deceased couple. As ghosts, they are not allowed to leave their house. They contact Betelgeuse, 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. Pictures. The film was a critical and commercial success, grossing $84 million against 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 a media franchise, consisting of an animated television series, video games, a 2018 stage musical and a 2024 sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
Plot
In Winter River, Connecticut, Adam and Barbara Maitland are spending their vacation decorating their large country home that local real estate agent Jane Butterfield constantly pesters them to sell. As a hobby, Adam is building a scale model of the town in the attic. While the Maitlands are driving home from town, they swerve to avoid a stray dog and their car plunges off a bridge and into the river. Barbara and Adam arrive home, but are unable to recall how they got there. When attempting to leave the house, Adam finds himself on Saturn's moon Titan, populated by enormous sandworms. The encounter lasts mere seconds for him, but after Barbara rescues him, she tells him he was gone for two hours. After noticing they now lack reflections and discovering a Handbook for the Recently Deceased, the couple realizes that they drowned in the river and are ghosts.
The house is sold to New York City real estate developer Charles Deetz and his second wife, Delia, a talentless sculptor. Charles' teenage goth daughter, Lydia, lives with them. Under the guidance of interior designer Otho Fenlock, Delia begins renovating the house with a new-wave aesthetic of postmodern art.
While consulting the Handbook on how to eject the Deetzes, the Maitlands see an advertisement for "Betelgeuse". Following the handbook's guidelines, they travel to an otherworldly waiting room populated by other distressed souls. After navigating the afterlife's complex bureaucracy, the Maitlands return home, only to discover the house has been completely redesigned. Their caseworker, Juno, arrives and discloses three months have passed and the Maitlands must remain in their house for the next one hundred twenty-five years before "moving on", while discouraging them from contacting Betelgeuse, her former assistant-turned-freelance "bio-exorcist" who can only be summoned by uttering his name three times, to drive out the Deetzes rather than doing it independently.
Adam and Barbara are invisible to Charles and Delia, which thwarts their fright attempts. Lydia, however, can see them, which she attributes to her extrasensory perception. The Maitlands invoke Betelgeuse and are transported into the model, but find his crude and morbid demeanor offensive. The Maitlands possess Charles, Delia and their wealthy friends during a dinner party. Unexpectedly, their antics only amuse the group; inspiring Charles to pitch a supernatural amusement park to investor Maxie Dean. The Deetzes uncover the town model in the attic, where Otho finds the Handbook. Betelgeuse, transformed it into a giant snake, soon terrorizes the Deetzes before Barbara banishes him back to the model.
Juno summons Barbara and Adam and berates them for releasing Betelgeuse, letting themselves be photographed by Lydia and losing the handbook to Otho. Meanwhile, Lydia, depressed and blaming the Maitlands for Betelgeuse's attack, discovers the latter inside the model. She almost summons him in exchange for passage to the afterlife, but the Maitlands return and stop her as well as talk her out of suicide.
Maxie and his wife arrive, demanding evidence of paranormal occurrences, but the Maitlands refuse to manifest again. Using the Handbook, Otho conducts what appears to be a séance. He summons Adam and Barbara by using their wedding clothes, but they begin aging and decaying rapidly; Otho had mistakenly mixed the incantation with an exorcism, leaving them in a state of perpetual suffering.
A horrified Lydia invokes Betelgeuse, who will help if she marries him so he can remain in the mortal world. He saves the Maitlands, disposes of the Deans, drives away Otho and then prepares to wed Lydia. The Maitlands attempt to banish Betelgeuse, who teleports Adam to the town model and Barbara to Titan. Barbara rides back into the house on a sandworm, which devours Betelgeuse.
The Deetzes and the Maitlands agree to harmoniously live together. Meanwhile, Betelgeuse is stuck in the waiting room, waiting his turn to see a caseworker. He attempts to steal a numbered ticket from a witch doctor's ghost, who retaliates by shrinking his head.
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.
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). Burton read their first draft of Beetlejuice and 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. A reference to this remains: Barbara remarks that her arm feels frozen upon returning home as a ghost.Burton, Tim (1988). Beetlejuice. Warner Bros. Studios. 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 lashing 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 attempts to rape Lydia instead of forcing her to marry him. 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. The original script also features the existence of a second Deetz child, nine-year-old Cathy who is a happy and well-adjusted child in contrast to her older sister Lydia, and who also becomes a victim of Betelgeuse, as he mauls her while in the form of a rabid squirrel.
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:
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. 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 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.
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 Michael 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 Winona Ryder upon seeing her in Lucas. Anjelica Huston was originally cast as Delia Deetz but dropped out because of illness. Geffen offered the role to Catherine O'Hara who nearly declined as she couldn't stop thinking about Ned Beatty in the title role, but she then flew from her home in Toronto to Los Angeles to meet with Burton but she went to the wrong Warner Bros. lot and missed him. 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". Burton also felt that O'Hara and Jeffrey Jones would make a "cute couple". Lydia Deetz was notably cast with the look and persona of the Goth subculture.
Filming