[00:00] Without this ghost at the most, there'd be no MCU if you know it. Hello and welcome back to Spooky Season, boys and ghouls. I'm Gina Ippolito, your resident campy 80s horror flick nerd. And this time, I'm talking about the gothic horror comedies that reimagined the afterlife as a bureaucratic nightmare.
[00:14] 1988, Beetlejuice. So turn down the lights and grab your handbook for the recently deceased. This is The Witching Hour on New Rockstar. And it's Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice.
[00:27] Beetlejuice. It's showtime. Everyone who grew up with this movie has an appreciation for its legacy. Options drive suit, calypso music, practical effects, somewhat unknown stars who would rocket into the public eye following its release,
[00:42] and an audience that would no longer be able to look at shrimp cocktail the same way again. This movie has it all. But no discussion of Beetlejuice would be complete without talking about how its success ultimately gave us a movie that radically reshaped the superhero genre and led to the DCU and the MCU we know today.
[00:57] Tim Burton was born in 1958 in Burbank, California. An oddball with a wild imagination, he shot offbeat short movies in his backyard using stop-motion techniques. In 1976, he attended CalArts to study character design, where he made some short films that got the attention of Disney,
[01:12] the company that would go on to hire him after he graduated. While at Disney, he made several distinctly un-Disney-like animated shorts, including Frank and Leanie, released in 1984, which he would, years later, make into a successful feature-length film.
[01:24] Disney hated the shorts. They thought it was too dark for their audience and fired Burton for wasting time and resources. But those shorts did gain Burton one fan. After Paul Reuben saw them and pushed execs to hire Burton as the director of a feature-length film going into production,
[01:37] they saw his popular subversive children's show character, Pee-wee Herman. Pee-wee's Big Adventure was released by Warner Brothers in 1985 and was a huge success, grossing over $40 million in North America on a budget of just $7 million.
[01:49] Burton's feature-length directorial debut was a success. Warner Brothers then offered him the opportunity to direct a live-action Batman film. But after hearing some of his takes on the property, they felt his tone was too weird and experimental for a superhero film.
[02:01] So they brought him other projects, including one titled Hot to Trot, which featured Bobcat Goldthwait and a talking horse who gives investment advice. Needless to say, Burton wasn't too happy with the options he was being presented with. That film actually got made, by the way.
[02:14] It was released in 1988 and got five Golden Raspberry Award nominations, including one for Worst Picture. It did not make its budget back. But then, Burton read a script for a movie called Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice focuses on a married couple, Adam and Barbara Maitlands, living in the fictional town of Winter River, Connecticut.
[02:30] One day, when driving home from running an errand, the Maitlands crash their car through the side of a covered bridge after swerving to avoid an adorable pooch. The car crashes into the river below. Upon returning home, the Maitlands realize that they didn't survive the crash and are, in fact, dead.
[02:43] An overeager real estate agent sells their house to the Dietzes, a family from New York made up of Charles, a real estate developer, his second wife Delia, a sculptor, and Charles' goth teenage daughter Lydia. Delia and her insufferably postmodern trendy interior designer Ozo decide they want to
[02:58] totally overhaul the house, so Adam and Barbara try and haunt them to get them out of there. But it turns out the only one who can actually see them is Lydia. Adam and Barbara travel to the afterlife to ask for advice, but come up empty, and after several attempts to drive out the Deaces themselves, they enlist the help of a self-proclaimed
[03:12] bio-exorcist named Beetlejuice. He wreaks havoc, and the Maitlands have regressed about hiring him. Ozo performs what he thinks is a seance-slash-summoning spell for the Maitlands, but is actually an exorcism, and Barbara and Adam's bodies begin to decay. Lydia, who's taken a liking to the couple,
[03:26] asks Beetlejuice for his help to save them. He agrees, but only if she agrees to marry him. So, he comes out and saves the day, but also tries to get rid of Barbara and Adam when they try to stop his creepy underage teenage girl wedding. He sends Adam away to a small model town, and Barbara to
[03:40] Saturn's moon Titan. Once there, Barbara wrangles a giant sandworm, which she rides back into the house to eat Beetlejuice. In the end, the Deacons and the Maitlands live in the house together, helping each other out, and Beetlejuice is sent to the DMV-esque afterlife waiting room,
[03:53] where his attempts to con a dead witch doctor out of his place in line leaves his head being shrunk down. The movie is original and bonkers and was totally unlike anything that came before it, and almost certainly wouldn't have gotten the green light if it was being pitched today. But that original script was very different from what ended up being on screen.
[04:08] Michael McDowell was actually a novelist before he sat down to write the script for Beetlejuice. He was best known for his gothic horror stories, and fellow horror writer Stephen King once called him the finest writer of paperback originals in America. In the 1980s, he started writing scripts.
[04:21] With former Paramount exec Larry Wilson, he wrote an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents titled The Jar. And that episode was directed by none other than Tim Burton. One day, after being disrupted by noisy neighbors, McDowell got the idea to turn an age-old haunted house story on its head.
[04:35] What if, instead of spooky ghosts haunting the frightened living, it was actually friendly ghosts being terrorized by nightmarish homeowners? He wrote the script with Wilson and started sending it around. That original script draft was much more of a straightforward horror movie than what ended up on screen.
[04:49] Barbara and Adam's deaths were described in much more grisly, horrific detail. The Deetses had another daughter in addition to Lydia, and Lydia ended up dying in a fire and going to the afterlife at the end of the film. But the biggest difference was in the character of Beetlejuice himself.
[05:01] He was less an agent of chaos and more a terrifying winged demon who could shape shifts and wanted nothing but death and destruction. An executive at Geffen Productions loved the script and bought it. Then he found a home at Warner Brothers where Geffen had a deal.
[05:14] Before Burton signed on, Master of Horror Wes Craven was actually attached to direct. He left the project to instead direct Nightmare on Elm Street 3, Dream Warriors, which I talk about in my video essay on that franchise, and is one of my favorite entries in the Elm Street saga.
[05:27] Beetlejuice was freed up for Burton to come on board. Burton, Geffen, and Warner Brothers knew that the script as it was was a little too dark for general audiences. So they brought in screenwriter Warren Skarin, whose biggest claim to fame at the time was writing a screenplay for Beverly Hills Cop 2 to do a rewrite.
[05:40] Burton knew that Skarin would add just the right amount of weirdness humor and family elements to the dark script At one point the execs at Warner Brothers became nervous about the title of the film They thought that no one would really get it and pitched the brand alt title House Ghost
[05:54] Burton understandably balked at the suggestion, and during one particularly frustrating meeting, jokingly said they should just call the film Scare Sheetless. To his horror, Warner Brothers actually liked the title. That's when Burton put his foot down and told them that the Beetlejuice title was stinging as is.
[06:08] Beetlejuice, spelled this way, is actually the name of a red supergiant star and one of the brightest stars in the night sky, and is unstable and known for acting unpredictably. Beetlejuice, spelled this way, is the title of the film about an unpredictable and unstable bioexorcist.
[06:23] But throughout the film, the character's name is spelled in different and sometimes unpredictable ways, hence why at one point, Adam sees the word and isn't sure how to pronounce it, and says Beetlegeist. It's just another bit of fun Burton was having with the title
[06:44] after all the grief the execs gave him about it. So now the film had its script. It was time for the studio to move on to catching lightning in a bottle with the actors who would bring it to life. For the wholesome and madly in love Maitland, the studio cast Alex Baldwin and Gina Davis.
[06:57] At the time, Baldwin had only really done TV and TV movies, and this would be his first big film role. Baldwin said he didn't really get the script or the character and was worried the whole thing would be the death of all of their careers. Davis, on the other hand, actually got the role because she did understand the assignment. Coming off of
[07:12] the success of movies like 1986 is a Fly and 1985 Flesh, which he had a small role in, Davis read the script for Beetlejuice and met with Burton. In an interview, Davis said that during that meeting, she told Burton that she really got the movie and very much wanted to be in it. Later, Burton told
[07:26] that he cast her because he felt like he didn't have a good grasp on it, and that he felt, quote, it would be very handy to have somebody on set that knew what it was about. Davis didn't even have to audition. For the patriarch of the Deeds family, they cast Jeffrey Jones, and I'm not really
[07:39] going to talk about that dude because he's a registered sex offender. You can look that up yourself. The role of Delia originally went to Morticia Adams and the Grand High Witch herself, Angelica Houston, but after walking away because of a family illness right before filming, the late,
[07:52] great Catherine O'Hara was brought in, and the role was tweaked to better fit her personality and style. O'Hara actually passed on the role at first before being convinced by Burton to take it. Actually, several of the actors initially passed because they weren't sure what they'd be getting into. O'Hara, a Canadian living in Toronto at the time, initially went to the wrong place to meet
[08:08] with Burton, and by the time she made it to the Warner Brothers lot, he'd left for the day. But she got the role anyway without even having to audition for it. For the role of Lydia, practically every young female star in Hollywood was considered at one point or another. From Jennifer Jason Leigh
[08:21] to Molly Ringwald to Sarah Jessica Parker, Burton felt that none of them were quite right for the role. But then, you saw Winona Ryder in the movie Lucas. When Ryder went to audition for Beetlejuice, she remembers a young guy striking up a conversation with her while she waited. The
[08:34] two talked about old movies and the art of Edward Gorey, and eventually, Ryder realized she was talking to the director himself. Burton told her then and there that he wanted her to play Lydia, and just like Davis and O'Hara, she didn't even end up having to audition. But the most important
[08:46] role in the film, that of the titular character, was also the hardest to cast. Burton knew he didn't want a traditional comedian for the role like Warner Brothers did, and originally he had Sammy Davis Jr. in mind as his dream guest, picturing the character as an ultra-cool Vegas
[08:58] clown singer. But the studio didn't get the vision, and there were concerns that Davis, who was over 60 at the time, might not be able to do the physically demanding, energetic role. Jefferson suggested Michael Keaton, who was known at the time for his roles in light comedy films
[09:11] like Mr. Mom and Night Shift. Keaton turned down the role twice. There wasn't much of the character in the original script, and Keaton wasn't sure what the role even was. But eventually, he agreed to meet with Burton, who won him over. And a lot of the character was actually created
[09:24] from Keaton himself, who committed so hard to the role that he alleviated any fears the other actors had about the film. Baldwin described him as a comedy Annie Oakley, saying he was so self-assured and he just tore it up. Keaton even improvised a lot of the lines and movements, and to this day he still cites
[09:38] it as one of his favorite roles he's ever done. The cast was rounded out by Glenn Shaddix as interior designer Osho. This was Shaddix's breakout film role. Comedian and talk show host Dick Cavett had a small role as Bernard. Cavett also had a small role in the aforementioned Nightmare on Elm Street 3, playing himself.
[09:53] and singer Robert Goulet played the hard-to-impress investor Maxie Dean. He also had a small role as himself in 1988's Scrooge, which would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Makeup and which would ultimately lose out to Beetlejuice. Scrooge also co-starred Hot to Drop's Bobcat Goldthwait.
[10:07] With the cast in place, it was time to move on to production. I don't know why, but the month of September always feels like a major transition for me. Like, I haven't been in high school since high school, but because I spent so many of my formative years treating September
[10:20] like the start of some big new adventure, it's just hard to flip that switch off. And it's not just the residual inertia of going back to school. A lot of the patterns I developed before I had the right context or self-awareness to appreciate them still linger.
[10:32] Something my therapist is reminding me of that's really helpful is that now I can apply adult context and agency to some of those feelings. So yeah, it's September, and if I'm feeling geared up for a big new adventure, why not just lean into it?
[10:44] Maybe you feel the same way, maybe you've been thinking about therapy yourself, and maybe now is the time to embark on that adventure. BetterHelp, the sponsor of today's video, makes starting therapy easy. You take a short quiz, then get matched with a licensed therapist quickly.
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[11:21] Let's get back to it. After 1986 Little Shop of Horrors underperformed for them at the box office Warner Brothers got a little squirrely about budget They gave Burton a strict budget of only million for Beetlejuice It went into production in March of 1987 on the Culver Studios lot with all of the outdoor shots and action being shot in
[11:37] East Corinth, Vermont. Burton wanted a small-town location, and the location scout reportedly saw an image of East Corinth on a postcard and realized it was exactly what they'd been looking for. They redid the signs in the town in the same style that was already there. Burton wanted the Deces' arrival
[11:51] with their New York trendiness to feel like a jarring invasion. Burton's first choice for production designer, Anton Furst, was shooting a different movie at the time. One day, when Burton was wandering around the Warner Brothers lot, he stopped into the set of The Lost Boys, where he saw production designer Bo Welch's work. Burton showed Welch some of his own drawings for how he
[12:06] wanted the aesthetic of Beetlejuice to look, and Welch got it immediately. So Bo Welch was brought on board, and the movie ultimately changed his life in more ways than one. He would go on to work with Burton for years to come, and he met his future wife, Catherine O'Hara, on the film. They
[12:19] stayed married until her death in 2026 at age 71. Welch's set decorator, Cheryl Karasik, built the facade of the beach's altered modern house on a hill in the Vermont town. Art director Tom Duffield has said that Beetlejuice was the strangest script he'd ever read up until that point.
[12:33] Welch and Duffield tried to match the design of the covered bridge where the Maitland Seeker ends to the same design you'd see in a small New England town. Below the bridge was a small creek they had to block off for the crash scene. The problem was that they needed at least three or four feet of water for the car to land in to actually be submerged,
[12:48] so they had to keep damming the creek with blocks of concrete, and storms kept washing the dams away. so they just kept rebuilding it and rebuilding it until they got their shot. Burton wanted the whole film to have a handmade old-school B-movie vibe to it and pushed everyone to work with that
[13:01] aesthetic in mind. The afterlife waiting room was designed to look like a DMV because there's nothing more terrifyingly mundane than knowing that that's what's waiting for you after death. When it came time to score the film, Burton knew just the man for the job. He'd been a big fan of
[13:13] the band Oingo Boingo, who were known for their experimental new wave pop-punk sound. When he had to hire someone to do the music for Pee Wee's Big Adventure, Burton approached Oingo Boingo, lead singer and songwriter Danny Elfman. The two would go on to work together many times over the
[13:26] years, including on Beetlejuice. With the small budget, securing music rights for existing songs was more difficult. It was actually Catherine O'Hara who suggested using Calypso music for the memorable possessed dance scene. Burton got the rights to several Harry Belafonte songs, including
[13:40] Gale, a vocal version which actually opens the film, sung by Danny Elfman, and Jump in the Line, Shakespeare, which is the song Lydia dances and lip syncs to in the final scene. In the original script, Beetlejuice himself was described as a leather-winged demon that could take on human
[13:54] form. Once that was changed and Keaton came on board, he actually came up with a lot of the look for the character himself with the help of Oscar-winning makeup artist V. Neal, who's since worked on movies like Dick Tracy, Edward Scissorhands, and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Keaton said,
[14:07] I started thinking about my hair. I wanted my hair to stand out like I was wired and plugged in, and once I started getting that, I actually made myself laugh. In one of the meetings about the character, Burton told Keaton that Beetlejuice should feel like a thing that could come from any
[14:20] period of time. So Keaton called the wardrobe department and told them to send him everything they could think of from different time periods. A huge wardrobe rack showed up and he started going to town. They never rehearsed the finished look or put it on camera before shooting day and Keaton
[14:32] said that he was fully prepared to walk out of his trailer and he told, not that. But instead, everyone was on board and an iconic look was born. If you've watched my other videos, you know I'm a huge fan of practical effects in movies from this era. Only $1 million of Beetlejuice's $15 million
[14:46] budget was allocated to effects, so the filmmakers had to get very creative to pull off the stylized looks, dead creatures, and supernatural scenes. Given his affinity for the B-movies of his childhood, Burton wanted to make the effects look purposely fake to add to the surreal and heightened
[15:00] nature of the world. Burton absolutely didn't want to do things in post-production if he could help it. He teamed up with effects expert Rick Heinrichs, and any scene where something crazy had to happen effects-wise, he insisted that they figure out how to do it live and in camera. Visual effects
[15:13] supervisor Alan Monroe storyboarded out a lot of the film over a period of several months, wondering the whole time if Warner Brothers was actually going to make the bonkers film. For the scene where Geena Davis is holding Baldwin's decapitated head, art director Tom
[15:25] Duffield said that they pulled this off with some writing equipment and old tricks. Baldwin kneeled behind a black show card, something writing experts use to block reflections and control light while filming. The card was cut to accommodate his chin and a fake prosthetic
[15:38] neck piece, and everything was done in camera. In the wide shot, they just had Davis hold the prop head. When Baldwin runs through the set without his head attached, he simply bent his head forward and ran. They put a prosthetic on his shoulders to hide it. A fake skull was made for the scene where Barbara rips her face off.
[15:53] The scene where they stretch their faces to show off how scary they can be was done with sculptures based on animation from Burton's own design. Burton brought in puppeteer Mark Ryan Wilson for some of the other scenes. The sandworms were a mix of stop-motion, rod puppets, and large models.
[16:06] The Beetlejuice take was also stop motion and a large puppet head. Wilson said that the fly in the scene where Beetlejuice lures it into the model was a very large puppet. But after the movie came out, people thought it was real and that they trained a fly to do what they wanted.
[16:19] There were a lot of scenes where the budget limitations led to some iconic moments. For instance, in the script, Beetlejuice was supposed to show his terrifying face to the Maitland's, and the audience was also supposed to see it. But to save money, the filmmakers had the idea to show this moment only from behind.
[16:33] So you have to imagine what it is that the Maitland's are seeing. The exorcism slash wedding scene was where they pulled out all the tricks. It was done with makeup and puppet effects on Adam and Barbara, Delia's art coming to life was achieved with stop motion,
[16:45] and Beetlejuice's rising carnival entrance was filmed in real time with the actor in makeup rising up with some cool lighting. For the end scene with Lydia levitating and dancing, they used mirrors to make the football players look ghostly, and then hidden wires and a very painful rig to lift up Ryder.
[16:59] A lot of the dead in the afterlife were done using prosthetic puppet bodies with actors simply putting their heads through holes. Also a couple of fun facts. The sod-in-half magician's assistant at the end was played by two people. The torso that slaps Beetlejuice was one actress and the pair of legs he fills up was played by artist Nina Gusecki who was Burton girlfriend at the time and would later go on to become his wife And the preacher creature who presides over the wedding was voiced by Jack Angel a prolific voice actor known for characters like Papa Smurf but inside the costume was Tony Cox who you know
[17:27] from movies like Bad Santa and Friday. Test audiences for the film initially sounded a little bit confusing, especially one scene in which Adam left his house and ended up in a black void with huge clock gears all around him. They also had grown to really like Beetlejuice himself throughout
[17:39] the movie and were worried when he got eaten by the sandworm. Burton cut the clothier scene, instead focusing on the idea that when the Maitland's leave their house, they get transported to Saturn's moon Titan, which is populated by sandworms. He also added in the waiting room
[17:52] scene with Beetlejuice at the end, so the audience would know he was okay and they would get one more laugh with him. The movie was rated PG because the 80s were crazy. I wanted the invention of the PG-13 rating in my video essay on Gremlins, but basically, after Gremlins and Indiana Jones and the Temple
[18:06] of Doom came out, people realized that there needed to be a rating between PG and R, and it's maybe only because PG-13 was still a somewhat new concept that Beetlejuice escaped it. Beetlejuice opened on March 30th, 1988, and earned over $8 million in its first weekend.
[18:20] It grossed over $75 million worldwide, and was officially a hit with audiences and critics. The film won three Saturn Awards for Best Horror Film, Best Makeup, and Best Supporting Actress for Sylvia Sidney, who played afterlife caseworker Juno.
[18:32] It also won makeup artists V. Neal, Steve LaPorte, and Robert Short Academy Awards for Best Makeup. The character of Beetlejuice doesn't show up in person to interact with other characters until halfway through the movie, and was only on screen for about 15 minutes of it.
[18:45] Keith and Burton knew that his chaos and energy would only work in small doses, and they didn't want him to overstay his welcome. And it worked. Anyone who's set foot in a Halloween costume store and seen that black and white pinstripe suit in a plastic bag
[18:57] can appreciate the legacy of this film. It's from a Saturday morning cartoon developed by Burton that paired up Beetlejuice and Lydia as friends having adventures together. I rewatched it and it holds up. It ran for four seasons and won a Daytime Emmy. There were also Beetlejuice video games, themed bars, a live action show at Universal Studios,
[19:13] and a stage musical that made headlines in 2023 because of what Congresswoman Lauren Boebert was doing with her male companion in the audience. For years, there was talk of a sequel, with scripts for the film including ideas for Beetlejuice in Love and Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian,
[19:25] which was inspired by the style and tone of the beach-branded bingo movies of the 50s and 60s. But nothing materialized until September of 2024, 36 years after the first film, when Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was released. The studio wanted to recreate the exterior sets on a soundstage,
[19:40] but Burton refused and instead went back to East Corinth, Vermont, where locals got to see movie history being made for a second time. The sequel also, again, used a slew of practical effects instead of doing CGI or things in post. It was made for under $100 million and grossed $452 million.
[19:55] Over the years, Beetlejuice has seeped into every facet of pop culture, and in it, you can see stories of Burton's movies still to come. When Beetlejuice rises up in the carnival scene towards the end of the film, there's a little figure on the tip of his hat that looks an awful lot like
[20:08] Jack Skellington, from Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. The corpse bride rising up during the exorcism has a lot of similarities to the memes in Burton's 2005 Corpse Bride. One of my favorite pop culture Beetlejuice-inspired moments happens in the TV show Community. Over the
[20:22] course of three seasons, the characters, for one reason or another, say the word Beetlejuice three times. After the third time, Beetlejuice crosses in the background as if summoned by hearing his name three times. Over the years, Burton worked with a lot of the same people he worked with on
[20:35] Beetlejuice. Oso's Glenn Chavix was the voice of the mayor in Nightmare Before Christmas and Senator Natto in Burton's 2001 Planet of the Eight. O'Hara returned for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, but was also Sally and Shock in Nightmare Before Christmas. She was also in the theatrical length
[20:48] version of Frank and Me and several other Burton projects. Ryder also came back for the Beetlejuice sequel and was also in Frank and Me and Burton's Edward Scissorhands. Not an exhaustive list of the collaborations Burton and the folks on Beetlejuice took part in by any means, but you
[21:02] get it. He likes who he likes. There's been no word yet on a third film in the series, but Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice seems like it would be a pretty sure thing to me. But perhaps the film's most lasting legacy is its effect on the superhero genre. After the success of Beetlejuice, Warner
[21:15] Brothers was more willing to make the Batman movie that Burton wanted. That film reunited Burton, writer Warren Skarin, and Michael Keaton, whose casting was so controversial that Batman fans and producers alike all lost their minds. But Burton knew he was the man for the job, saying that
[21:30] Batman shouldn't be some muscled-up, hyper-macho, 80s action hero in the vein of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. He should appear to the outside world as an everyman. The movie, in Burton's opinion should be about the man, Bruce Wayne, not the superhero Batman. 1989's Batman was
[21:46] a huge financial and critical success, earning $411 million on a $48 million budget. Before the film came out, Hollywood had said that Batman, as a property, was dead. It came out at a time when superhero films just weren't really being made much. 1970's Superman was a success, but subsequent
[22:03] sequels underperformed and left producers even more wary about the genre than they were before. Batman's darker, more gothic, and stylized tone gave superhero movies permission to be a little bit silly, a little bit dark, and a little bit funny.
[22:15] That was key to its success. It helped pave the way for a renewed interest in superheroes, eventually leading to the greenlighting of movies like 1998's Blade, 2000's X-Men, and 2002's Spider-Man. And none of it would have been possible without Beetlejuice.
[22:28] Let me know in the comments what kind of horror movies you'd like to see us do next for Spooky Season. Big thanks to Studio Tech Brian Kim and new Rockstars editors Josh Hurd and Abby Friel and all the supporting editors. Follow me everywhere at Gina Issy. Subscribe to all channels in the Rockstars Network for breakdowns and news coverage of everything you love.
[22:43] I'll see you in the afterlife.