THE ZOMBIE'S 101 FAVORITE SCREENPLAYS: #74

BEETLEJUICE (1988)

The Writers

Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren; story by McDowell and Larry Wilson

Why It's Here

Film scholars tend to underestimate the importance of screenwriting to the success of Tim Burton's early directorial career. Given his wildly creative visual imagination and penchant for the macabre, it was natural for the cinematic establishment to credit Burton almost exclusively with the qualities of his first feature films, but the director himself has acknowledged that he was fortunate enough, his first few times out, to be working with top-quality scripts. On the DVD commentary track for his first feature, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Burton takes numerous opportunities to praise the work of the film's screenwriting team, and though Burton's second film, the lunatic supernatural comedy Beetlejuice, provides an even grander showcase for the filmmaker's flights of imagistic fantasy, much of the credit here must go to the writing as well. Burton certainly brings a lot to the table as the director of Beetlejuice, but it doesn't hurt that he had found, in the work of screenwriters Michael McDowell and the late Warren Skaaren (from a story by McDowell and Beetlejuice co-producer Larry Wilson), an absolutely perfect showcase for his visual style and thematic interests. The resultant collaboration is a film that, as much as any artistic work I can recall, spearheaded the acceptance of the morbid, the macabre, and pitch-black death-obsessed humor into the American mainstream. Such humor was always there, but on the fringes and usually nurtured by obsessive, insular coteries of fans (Monty Python's Flying Circus, for example, frequently showcased death and bloody mayhem in their sketches). Beetlejuice struck a different chord in people, and somehow managed to be accepted by the average moviegoer with true warmth and affection. How many other films about cockroach-eating pervert ghosts can you think of that inspired a Saturday morning cartoon series? I truly believe that without Beetlejuice, there would be no Marilyn Manson, no Hot Topic, perhaps even no Twilight. It's a film that turned America into a culture of virtual necrophiliacs. It helps, of course, that the film itself is a marvelous entertainment, consistently funny, inventively thought out, and in several of its narrative implications and relationships, surprisingly thoughtful and even touching.

In its first ten minutes, Beetlejuice gives the appearance of being a much different kind of comedy. The Maitlands are a young married couple living in the lush green hamlet of Winter River, Connecticut. Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) share a beautiful country house high on a hill, where Adam putters over a scale model of the town while Barbara fends off the overtures of her friend Jane (Annie McEnroe), a real-estate broker who is constantly trying to sell the house out from under them. These early scenes establish a gentle, bucolic tone, with Adam and Barbara playfully pulling each other down onto the couch for kisses and Adam, when he runs into town to get some supplies from his hardware store, wishing a friendly hello to Bill the barber (Hugo Stanger), who rambles on about a young hippie who came to his shop for a haircut ("He's got hair down to his goddamn shoulders...") without noticing that Adam has already come and gone. It almost feels like we're watching a film adaptation of one of Garrison Keillor's "News from Lake Wobegon" monologues. The town is too pretty, Adam and Barbara almost sickeningly perfect.

Then, the Maitland's two-week staycation is tragically interrupted when their car crashes off the Winter River Bridge. They arrive home to find that things are not right. They have no reflection in the house's mirrors. Not remembering how they got home, Adam steps off the house's front porch to find himself in a swirling interstellar space menaced by a gigantic sandworm. And then there's the book they find on their coffee table: Handbook for the Recently Deceased (published, of course, by "Handbook for the Recently Deceased Press"), which outlines, in excessively vague and complex fashion, all the rules and regulations of being ghosts...which is just what Adam and Barbara have become, condemned to haunt their earthly home for the next 125 years. Despite the fact that Barbara can't properly clean anything with the vacuum cleaner stuck in a garage they can't get to, spending a century-plus in their beautiful home might not be the worst fate imaginable. But then Jane sells the house to the Deetzes, a horrible family of misfits from the Big Apple. Charles (Jeffrey Jones) is a real-estate broker, recovering from a recent nervous collapse, who has come to the country to get away from it all...but his shrew of a second wife, trendoid sculptor Delia (a boisterous performance by Catherine O'Hara) insists on bringing the city with her in the form of her grotesque sculpted work, which looks like discarded props from Eraserhead, and by inviting her smirky interior designer friend Otho (Glenn Shadix) to join her in completely redoing the house the Maitlands loved so much. Only Lydia (Winona Ryder), Charles's emo-style, amateur-photographer daughter from his previous marriage, seems marginally acceptable. She likes the house (and hates Delia) as much as the Maitlands do. Plus, it turns out that she, alone among the new residents, can see and communicate with the ghosts. (She explains it thus: "Live people often ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual.") Lydia develops a strong bond with Adam and Barbara, who have no children of their own, but the Deetzes's destruction of their home and way of life becomes too much to bear...and it becomes worse when the whole family gets wind of the ghosts and Charles hatches a plan to turn the entire town into a supernaturally themed amusement park. Desperate, and against the advice of their spiritual case worker, Juno (a wonderfully dry Sylvia Sidney), the Maitlands call on outside help from a freelance "bio-exorcist" who claims to be able to "exterminate" the living from haunted houses, and who happens to be hiding out, in miniaturized form, inside Adam's model. That would be the titular ghoul, Betelgeuse, a rowdy, sleazy, spike-haired huckster of a creature, played by Michael Keaton in a performance that (along with his work in the same year's Clean and Sober) won him the National Society of Film Critics' Best Actor award. But Betelgeuse has his own dastardly schemes, and he uses the Maitlands and Lydia as dupes in a plot to escape from the underworld and back into the land of the living, where he can really do some serious damage.

As you can perhaps tell from the description above, Beetlejuice has an unusually strong narrative structure for a comedy. The writers have worked out a genuinely compelling dilemma for the ghost couple to grapple with, and they introduce a smart narrative wrinkle in the form of Lydia, who sympathizes entirely with their predicament (to the point of making plans to kill herself and join them on the other side) and causes them to question their entire drive to get the Deetzes out of the house. Likewise, the overarching conflict of the story, with the small-town, just-folks Maitlands against the monstrous hipsters from the big city, was expertly suited to the film's end-of-the-Reagan-years release date, when the staunchly American midwestern values espoused by Reagan were in combat with the greed-driven, poisonously self-centered yuppie philosophy that the era likewise spawned. (It also makes the film an interesting time capsule, as we now live in an era where big-city dwellers are more commonly painted as bulwarks of sanity and intelligence against the tide of perceived middle-American ignorance and intolerance.) The film's characters are admittedly broadly drawn, but within their individual parameters, they act believably and with consistent logic. When Adam and Barbara first attempt to "haunt" the Maitlands, their methods, which consist of throwing sheets with eyeholes over their heads and moaning like remote-control Halloween toys, strike one as exactly what a naive young pair of ghosts would do to scare someone. Then, when they finally figure out their haunting style, they do not hit the Deetzes with demons and danger the way Betelgeuse later does, but instead possess the family and their dining companions and throw them into a raucous dance number set to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O" (Adam is a big fan of calypso music, a nice quirky character touch). The characters all have perfect little moments like this, from Charles chirping a sotto voce "birdies" as he flips through an Audubon book to the relentlessly self-dramatizing Lydia composing a suicide note and changing "I am alone" to the much more anguished-sounding "I am utterly alone". Otho, a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none type, makes constant references to a seemingly endless string of bizarre and short-lived jobs; it is in fact his past stint as a paranormal researcher that finally brings the family in direct contact with the ghosts in a seance gone horribly wrong. Of the main characters, only Delia remains essentially a caricature, but since she and Betelgeuse (more on him later) are, for lack of a better word, the film's villains, the writers can get away with making her a little more shallow. Poorly developed villains are more or less standard in most comedies; if you make your villain too strong, after all, you run the risk of making the threat too dire and overwhelming the humor entirely.

Beetlejuice's writers very wisely avoid doing this by limiting the onscreen time of their titular monster. Many audiences may have been surprised, upon first seeing the film, to find that Betelgeuse is only onscreen, in the entire 92-minute picture, for about twenty minutes total. Save for one fleeting appearance where we don't see his face, and a hilarious used-car-style commercial beamed to Adam and Barbara's TV (where the cowboy-hatted Betelgeuse promises "a FREE demon possession with every exorcism"), the bio-exorcist is not in the first half of the film at all. But he is spoken of several times by other characters, always with fear and disgust (Juno warns the Maitlands not to even say his name...for reasons that become clear later, as it's saying his name three times that calls him into conscious being), and this slow buildup to the character's true narrative emergence makes the audience giddy with anticipation. Because of all this, the writers know that they are going to have make every second of Betelgeuse's time on the screen count, and when the character finally bursts forth from his grave, he definitely does not disappoint. He cuts a genuinely horrific appearance with his wild mane of hair, rotten teeth, dark-ringed eyes and face flecked with patches of filth and moss. He grossly forces himself on Barbara, spits loudly into his own jacket (telling Adam, "I'll save that guy for later"), feasts on insects, and praises himself ostentatiously as "the ghost with the most". He also has moments of goofy, unexpected drollery, as when Adam asks him his bio-exorcism qualifications and he coolly rattles off a resume including stints at Julliard and the Harvard Business School. Betelgeuse is like some nightmare combination of lecherous pimp, carnival barker, sleazy game-show host, and the worst stand-up comic you've ever seen (after one particularly explosive stunt, Betelgeuse declares, "That is why I won't do two shows a night anymore, babe."). He functions almost like a trickster figure in ancient myth, the pitch and tone of his humor so radically discursive from everything around him that he seems, as "wild man" characters in comedies so seldom truly do, like a genuinely disruptive force in the film's universe, an effect he would likely not have been able to achieve had he been front-and-center from the beginning. One does not want to discount the contribution of Michael Keaton, who here gives one of the most spectacularly unhinged comic performances in film history, but as they say and as is the case here, if it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage.

It is of course the world of Beetlejuice, as much as the film's characters and story, that make it soar, and the writers have set their tale in an inspired and utterly unique vision of the afterlife. The netherworld of Beetlejuice is like the most awful bureaucratic experience of your life, magnified tenfold. It starts with the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, which is actually full of useful information, but all delivered in a cryptic or sometimes completely inscrutable fashion (in a slightly dated but still effective joke, a frustrated Adam declares that the book "reads like stereo instructions"). Adam and Barbara find themselves at one point in a dingy, uncomfortable otherworld waiting room, surrounded by beings who bear the marks of the manner in which they died. There's a charred-to-the-bones ghoul who apparently went up while smoking in bed (trouper that he is, he's still puffing away), a man in a food-spattered bib with a lodged chicken bone bulging in his throat, even an unlucky magician's assistant whose severed torso sits on a sofa next to her legs. Exorcised spirits and demons are banished to the hellish Lost Souls Room, described as "death for the dead", and if that wasn't bad enough, even the "life" of a ghost is a seemingly endless welter of rules and regulations. Adam and Barbara can only have three meetings with Juno over the course of their 125-year stint in the house, and when they can't figure out how to properly scare the Deetzes, the case worker directs them to the dreaded Handbook's "intermediate interface chapter on haunting". Though Adam mentions at one point that the Handbook doesn't mention heaven or hell, if this afterlife world's heavy emphasis on bureaucratic frustration is any indication, then the Maitlands are definitely in hell. And they seemed like such a nice young couple. Maybe they cheated on their taxes or something.

As the description of the waiting room denizens above makes clear, Beetlejuice was also radical for a mainstream '80s comedy (keep in mind, this film was not an indie cult item, but a major studio release...and a box-office hit at that) in its detached, almost blase manner of joking about the most horrific subjects imaginable. Being burned or choked to death, being sawed in half, getting your throat slit...these are not inherently hilarious occurrences, but Beetlejuice is endlessly willing to exploit these kinds of images for laughs, as when smoke from Juno's cigarette pours through the deep gash in her throat, or when the receptionist in the waiting room jokes about her "little accident" while holding up her slit wrists. An intercom in the waiting room announces the arrival of "Flight 409", a reference to a famous unsolved airline crash from the fifties, and obituary pages in the Afterlife newspaper are much different than ours, inviting readers to "Please Welcome The Maitlands" (this is how Betelgeuse finds out about them; he regards the obituaries as the paper's "business section"). It's almost hard to remember how unusual it was, in 1988, to see this sort of pitch-black stuff in a big-budget studio comedy, and Beetlejuice is often insufficiently valued for its role in bringing truly transgressive humor into the mainstream.

This is not to say, however, that Beetlejuice is blithely unaware of the serious implications of death, and in the relationship between Barbara and Lydia, there are allusions to the true gravity of the end of life. In an early scene, Jane makes a callous comment to Barbara that such a big house really would be better suited to someone with a family. Barbara's sad expression and Jane's abrupt apology make it clear that the Maitlands' childless status is not by choice. Naturally, their early death will prevent them from ever knowing the joys of parenthood, but the nesting instinct is strong enough in Barbara that even in death, she feels maternally drawn toward Lydia. The girl is likewise receptive to Barbara's attentions. Her relationship with her stepmother Delia is almost entirely antagonistic, and though what happened to Lydia's mother is never discussed, her all-black wardrobe and morose personality lead us to believe that Charles is not a divorcee, but a widower. Lydia thus sees the replacement of her mother with Delia not just as a betrayal, but a desecration of her real mother's memory, leading to her feelings of solitude and desire for death, perhaps out of an unspoken (by the film) desire to rejoin her mother on the other side. (The fact that the film doesn't take this narrative step when Lydia learns of a real afterlife, and that it indeed doesn't definitively identify Lydia's mother as deceased, is probably mostly due to the genre; a comedy, even one as death-drenched as this, would have a hard time pulling laughs from such a predicament.) The film builds some surprising pathos out of the relationship between this sad young girl and her ghost mother, a bond made somehow more fragile and precious by the unbreakable membrane of death separating them. Even Betelgeuse, the netherworld's number one party animal, realizes that death is no ultimately no laughing matter. His plot to use the Maitlands to escape from the afterlife indicates that he wants "out, for good", and in the film's most intriguingly philosophical moment, when a miserable Lydia tells him that she wants to be dead too, his only answer is an utterly baffled "Why?" Beetlejuice is certainly no deep treatise on death and dying, but if one bothers to look, it is not nearly as flippant on the subject as its constant macabre jokes might initially indicate.

Like the previously reviewed Happy Gilmore, and indeed like many comedies, Beetlejuice has its uneven moments. A number of narrative incidents and aspects of the film's netherworld go unexplained (we never find out, for example, how Barbara tames the sandworm that saves them from Betelgeuse in the film's climax), and the picture suffers from a frequent cinematic narrative problem in that the characters react almost too serenely to something overwhelmingly incredible. After all, if confronted by the true existence of the afterlife, my first response would not be to build a theme park on top of it. Of course, I am not a character in a cinematic comedy, and as film comedies go, Beetlejuice is a great one. The picture cemented Tim Burton in the public imagination as a master of macabre subject matter and imagery, an image he has cultivated and grown into a lucrative career with films like Sleepy Hollow, Sweeney Todd, and The Nightmare Before Christmas...all pictures that bear the influence of Beetlejuice's visual tropes and narrative implications. Tim Burton is a visionary, no question about that. But he might never have gotten by without a little help from his screenwriting friends.

Personal Note: There has only been one occasion in my life so far when I have gotten to hold an Oscar...and it was an Oscar won for this film, by makeup artist Robert Short, who shared the 1988 Best Makeup award with Ve Neill and Steve LaPorte for their work on Beetlejuice. When you see what they did to the face of the actually quite handsome Michael Keaton, you'll understand why they won.

AWARD NOMINATIONS: Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films Award, Best Writing