Before he makes a film, director Tim Burton likes to draw sketches of his characters – they are invariably spindly, scraggy, orchestrated messes; always black, like lonely charcoal dreams.
I was practically a Tim Burton sketch when Beetlejuice came out in 1988: a mopey, awkward-haired teenager in outsized Dr Martens, I chain-smoked cigarettes like the poor sap in Beetlejuice’s afterlife waiting room who burned to death in bed. Beetlejuice might have been made for me.
Briefly, Beetlejuice is the story of the recently deceased Maitlands, a picture-perfect couple played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, who call on a “bio-exorcist” ghost called Betelgeuse to scare off their home’s new, living occupants. It was a hoot. A coronation for Burton, it was the start of a worldwide cult – the man was a messiah for weirdos, from Camden to Harajuku.
Beetlejuice didn’t mean anything, but it meant everything to me: the birth of a new aesthetic we didn’t know we’d been waiting for, a Halloween circus of Technicolor darkness, a celebration of oddity. Never had morbidity been so much fun. This was Salvador Dalí, Edward Gorey and Dr Seuss in a blender – cinematic crack for us adolescents craving something different, something that spoke to our surreal sensibilities. My videotape of the film was pored over incessantly, becoming appropriately warped.
Thirty years after its debut, I’m watching Beetlejuice again to monitor its own afterlife. The most significant thing that’s changed is me: I actually look like Betelgeuse now. Hopefully the film has weathered the decades better.
From the beginning, it’s the craftsmanship that takes the breath away. It takes a few seconds to remember that the landscape the camera sweeps through is a model, such is the level of detail. Burton treats the world like his playpen, making everything just so for his camera. And the visuals have not withered; the film does not seem terribly dated, because it was askew in the first place. Baldwin and Davis’s clean-cut looks and apple-pie attitudes seem more 1950s than 1980s, as do the stop-motion effects – state-of-the-art realism sacrificed for the pure joy of old-school invention. The entire thing is an excuse to let Burton’s imagination run rampant.
Winona Ryder’s sartorial shenanigans are just as glorious as they were in 1988, from her funeral garb at dinner, despite the absence of a funeral – “My whole life is a dark room. One big dark room” – to sleeves that practically hit the floor, she remains an unbeatable style icon. She is goth catnip. She is the people’s princess, for people who dress in black.
Conversely, the biggest surprise is how oversexed Betelgeuse is. He is very handsy, an absolute sex pest. I’d forgotten he goes to a brothel, gyrating and thrusting himself into it. “The whorehouse was my idea,” the Maitlands’ elderly afterlife case-worker tells them, exhaling cigarette smoke through her suicidal neck slit. It really is rather outrageous.
It’s amazing how stuffed with ideas this film is. The afterlife waiting room is Burton’s version of the Star Wars cantina, but the whole thing is batty, from the involuntary calypso the new occupants are supernaturally subjected to, to the Maitlands remaining straight-faced despite their own heads being transformed into massive beaks, to the wedding officiator who looks like a dead peanut. Every frame radiates joy.
That’s what the film leaves you with: delight. It doesn’t feel like it was worked to death by seasoned screenwriters, more that it was written by six-year-olds on a sugar rush: “And then they get married but the dead man drives into his foot in a tiny car and the dead lady crashes through the roof on a giant snake and eats him.”
Thirty years on, it’s impossible to feel at all let down by any of it, particularly the story, because it’s of such little consequence. The characters are precisely as developed as they need to be, which is not in the slightest. There was a cartoon spin-off, but there needn’t have been: it already is one. It’s a ghost train and a freak show, and feels more like Alice In Wonderland than Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland. We haven’t seen anything like it since – and we’re unlikely to again.
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