Reeling Backward: Beetlejuice (1988)

Tim Burton's dizzyingly weird horror-comedy marked the high point of his early career, before soulless remakes became his calling card. Here's hoping the sequel matches its subversive energy.

As we prepare for the sequel later this week, the most notable thing about the original “Beetlejuice” is how little he appears in the movie bearing his name.

Seriously, Michael Keaton’s undead prankster barely makes an appearance until about halfway through the movie, and only truly shows up and does his full shtick in the last 20 minutes. He’s a force of nature, of course, dominating every scene he’s in with his hyper-fast patter, sort of a zombified lounge lizard.

The other thing I noticed after my first rewatch in probably 25 years is how filthy Beetlejuice is. He says at least one f-word and a ‘shit’ or two, repeatedly attempts to fondle Geena Davis and has similar carnal designs on Winona Ryder, who was just 15 when they shot the movie playing a character who’s probably a couple of years younger than that.

All this, in a movie that somehow passed muster for a PG rating from the MPAA, despite a sumptuous buffet of gore and body horror — though admittedly presented very cartoonishly.

“Beetlejuice” is the movie where I first embraced director Tim Burton as one my favorite filmmakers, who would go on to one of the busiest and most fruitful stretches in Hollywood history: “Batman” and its sequel, “Edward Scissorhands,” “Ed Wood,” “Mars Attacks!” and “Sleepy Hollow.” Plus “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” which he had stop-motion animation veteran Henry Selick direct, but still bears his inimitable stamp as producer and story writer.

Then, as regular readers of this space know, Burton lost my affection with a series of soulless remakes and uninspired adaptations. Though a few gems have popped up here and there — “Big Fish,” “Big Eyes” — the last quarter-century has been a pretty disappointing affair.

His last turn of any kind was five years ago with “Dumbo,” which was a box office bomb in addition to being absolute dreck, and the studio system that was happy to finance his insipid fare because they consistently made money suddenly grew hesitant.

I worry that “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” exists only because Burton is fleeing back to commercially safe havens.

It’s hard to describe how dizzyingly weird and subversive “Beetlejuice” was, arriving toward the end of the Reagan era. I guess you would describe it as a horror-comedy, though it’s more surrealist satire than anything. Much of the visual style of Burton’s films, with Expressionist shadows and twisted shapes, was established here.

I was also struck how narratively and visually similar it is to “Scissorhands.” Both involve paranormal activities emanating from the lone house on the hill in an otherwise staid neighborhood — unnamed suburbia in the other film, and here the fictional Winter River, Conn., a bucolic small town outside of New York City. The subtext is the “normal” folks invade this space, and turn out to be the real weirdos.

Davis and Alec Baldwin play Barbara and Adam Maitland, an exceedingly normal married couple in their 30s living in a house everyone thinks is too big for just the two of them. They are commencing a two-week staycation — from what jobs, we know not — so Adam can fiddle with his impressive scale model of their town while Barbara does whatever it is Barbara does. They are killed when their car crashes through a bridge and plunges into a river, drowning them.

At first they are unaware they have died, simply reappearing back at their beloved house and setting about their usual affairs. The only hint is when they attempt to leave, they are transported into a bizarre desert wasteland where sandworms — not so different from the ones in “Dune” three years earlier — patrol.

They find a book, “Handbook for the Recently Deceased,” which has apparently been left for them but find it too dense and jargon-y to understand — “like stereo instructions,” several people comment. They do figure out enough to find their way to “the factory behind,” as I like to call it, the unnamed realm where ghosts like them receive their instructions from a complex bureaucracy.

Their caseworker, Juno (Sylvia Sidney), a chain-smoking ballbreaker type, warns they must haunt that house for 125 years, and if they don’t like the people who live there it’s up to them to scare them away. They’ll provide guidance and tips but that’s it.

They also learn that as ghosts they can still be “killed,” such as by the sandworms or exorcism, which results in them being assigned to the hall of lost souls; basically a cooler version of Hell.

As it stands, the Maitlands do not care for the people who move into their house, the Deetzes from the Big Apple, though their attempts to scare them prove inept. They keep hearing ads for this Betelgeuse guy, a self-described “bio-exorcist” who does for ghosts what human exorcists do for them: get rid of unwanted souls. A tidbit I’d forgotten is that Beetlejuice is supposed to have been Juno’s one-time assistant who went rogue.

Charles Deetz (Burton favorite Jeffrey Jones) is an amiable enough fellow, a real estate developer who apparently suffered a burnout and has bought the house as a refuge to relax. He’s not assisted in this by his second wife, Deelia (Catherine O’Hara), an insufferable avant garde artist/dilettante who immediately remakes the Maitland’s house in a mix of German Expressionism decor and her Cthulu-like sculptures.

Assisting her is her mentor/muse, Otho Fenlock (Glenn Shadix), an interior designer who took up that career after the bottom fell out of the whole exorcism thing in the 1970s — which is really a quite good meta joke when you think about it. He’ll apply some of both skillsets during the course of the movie.

The Deetzes’ daughter is Lydia, played by Ryder, who perpetually dresses like Frankenstein’s widow, complete with black veils and freakshow hairdo. She’s obsessed with photography and the occult, and is the only one who can see the Maitlands because she herself is “strange and unusual.”

The Maitlands’ first serious attempt at spooking backfires, in which they possess the Maitlands and their guests during a dinner party, forcing them to dance the Calypso to the tune of Harry Belafonte. After an initial shock, Charles and Deelia are delighted, and want to redevelop all of Winter River as some sort of paranormal theme park, but need their ghosts’ cooperation.

Pushed into a corner, Adam and Barbara finally call on Beetlejuice — all for the low, low price of saying his name out loud three times — whereupon he is summoned from his banishment, which seems to be not a specific place but sort of a micro-sized version of the real world, in this case Adam’s model of the town.

Once returned to full size his powers grow tremendously, including the ability to send other ghosts to the small world and manipulate the physical world to a far greater degree than his novice clients.

Keaton’s look and sound as Beetlejuice was instantly iconic, sort of like a clown that had crawled through the sewer and come out randy. He has greenish hair and mold-like schmutz growing across his temples and around his mouth, with blacked-out eye pits and snaggly teeth. He changes outfits often, but seems to favor velour-ish leisure suits.

Beetlejuice never really stops talking, and Keaton’s strangled-salesman croak can be hard to understand at times. Suffice to say the guy is only out for himself, and believes that by marrying Lydia he’ll rejoin the living, or at least have dominion over them.

The screenplay by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren, from a story by McDowell and Larry Wilson, is truly original and audacious stuff, if not entirely fleshed out from a metaphysical sense. You can easily poke holes in the movie’s internal logic — like why the Maitlands’ handbook for ghosts is a physical object Otho purloins — but at 92 minutes it’s so fast-paced it barely gives one a chance to think about it.

I was surprised to learn that “Beetlejuice” was not originally Burton’s choice of projects, wanting to go straight from his debut film, “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” into his adaptation of “Batman.” But the studio didn’t trust him enough yet for such a big production, and the script presented itself as a bridge project.

Burton originally wanted to cast Sammy Davis Jr. as Beetlejuice, a concept that just boggles the mind, and manic comedian Sam Kinison was also considered, which at least presents a much more intriguing possibility. No doubt if Keaton hadn’t been cast, someone else would have eventually worn Batman’s cowl.

That “Beetlejuice” became a commercial hit is still a stunning thing, as mainstream audiences embraced its mix of kinky humor, necrophilia and puckish attitude toward “normie” society. If they hadn’t, one wonders if Tim Burton would have been stuck somewhere as an unsatisfied commercial artist, and the superhero movie craze never would have taken off.