Horror comedies have been around for years before Beetlejuice. Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein was one. Then, you had Young Frankenstein. But actually mixing gruesome horror elements with comedy was still new. George A. Romero had added it as satire to Dawn of the Dead showing zombies lurching around a mall and looking amazed at seeing things move like the escalator.
Ghostbusters had been a big hit in 1984 mixing comedy, fantasy and horror elements together but it seemed to be more about comedy. Most horror comedies were lower budget, more independent fare. Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn blended violent gruesome horror and gore with silly slapstick that worked. Then there was The Toxic Avenger which gained a cult following. But most of it was stuff you’d find in the horror section of the video rental places such as Redneck Zombies or Return to Horror High.
So, when Beetlejuice hit the theaters on March 30, 1988 it came with A-listers such as Geena Davis, riding high after The Fly and rising star Alec Baldwin. And then there was Michael Keaton in the role of Betelgeuse. Keaton was very popular following movies like Mr. Mom, Gung Ho and Johnny Dangerously even though the movies weren’t well received by critics. And it began with the main characters being killed off within the first 15 minutes.
Baldwin and Davis play Adam and Barbara Maitland, your basic young couple living in a New England hamlet town of Winter River, Conn. Adam runs a hardware store in town but has decided to take the week off as well as Barbara, whose profession is never told. Adam needs to take a quick trip to the store as they intend to spend the week off working on their country home which overlooks the town. However, as they are driving through the covered bridge, Barbara swerves to avoid hitting a dog and they crash through down into the waters below. Actually, there is a moment as said down is standing on the piece of wood that is balancing them from their impending doom.
They return home in a lethargic manner unsure of how they got back and notice the fireplace is on. Things seem odd but when Adam steps out, he is transferred to a different world temporarily but it’s several hours. Barbara has noticed they have no reflection in the mirror and there is a book, Handbook for the Recently Deceased, setting on their coffee table. They’re dead and ghosts, stuck in their house unable to get out.
And things go from bad to worse as Barbara’s sister, Jane Butterfield (Annie McEnroe), has sold their house to Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) a former real estate developer who has moved from New York City to the countryside for some peace and quiet. However, his second wife, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), is an avant-garde post-modern wannabe artist/sculptor, who wants to rearrange the house to her standards with her interior designer friend, Otho (Glenn Shadix). The Deetz also have a daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder) who is going through a Goth teenager phase.
The movie takes a twist on the haunted house trope in that Adam and Barbara are the ghosts being haunted by the living. And no matter what they do to scare the Deetzs and Otho, nothing works. Barbara fakes being hung in the closet and pulling her face off, but Otho and Delia are more creeped out by the closet space and the generic clothes. When they also try to scare everyone off by having Barbara appear with a severe head of Adam in his study, Otho delivers the line “Deliver me from L.L. Bean,” because Adam’s study literally looks like it’s from a photoshoot of the magazine.
This type of dark humor probably surprised many audiences especially considering that Beetlejuice has a family-friendly PG rating. The movie taps into that branch of humor that wasn’t hardly being explored, but nowadays seems everywhere. When Adam and Barbara cross over into the other world temporarily where they have to meet their case worker, Juno (Sylvia Sidney), they discover other recently deceased people who are worse off than them. A magician’s assistant has actually been sawed in half. A charred man’s corpse is nervously smoking cigarettes. There’s a morbidly obese man with what appears to be a bone stuck in his neck. And going on to something that Otho mentions, all those working in a civil service job apparently were suicides. While suicide isn’t funny, it doesn’t really dwell on it. Juno herself has a slit throat where the smoke from the cigarettes she smokes flow through.
It would be very easy for a filmmaker to go overboard with the material. This is only Tim Burton’s second movie after Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. He gives the movie a playfulness tone to it that would become his signature. This is like a young kid that likes to scare the other kids in the neighborhood but not too harsh. Despite its images of people who have been killed in car wrecks and even apparently runover by a steamroller, there’s a comical exaggeration to it that keeps it from being too much. In Evil Dead 2 and Peter Jackson’s Braindead, aka Dead-Alive, both filmmakers went for the jugular literally with gross-out comic effects. And both movies are wonderful entries into the horror comedy genre. This is more on touch with what Clue was going for in 1985 that people didn’t fully understand before it found its audience on the home-video market and cable TV.
As for the big man himself, I was surprised at how little Betelgeuse appears on screen, despite being used in the marketing. Keaton, himself, reportedly only spent two weeks filming his scenes. He doesn’t appear on screen with the main cast for one two crucial scenes. Other than that, it is shown mostly speaking to people off camera as he spends a lot of time in a miniature model of the town Adam has constructed. There’s even been some speculation that Keaton based his performance off Bill Moseley’s outrageous performance as Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, which took a more comedic approach to the 1974 original.
When he’s on screen, Keaton commands it with a hilarious tour-de-force performance that almost makes us forget he’s supposed to be the bad guy. Betelgeuse isn’t the hero. He’s violent and perverted. His goal is to go after Lydia who he calls “Edgar Allen Poe’s daughter.” And during one scene visits a brothel of sexy demons. Also, Keaton’s ad-libbing almost cost the movie it’s rating as he reportedly dropped the F-bomb when he accidentally kicked over a model tree. During another scene where he’s trying to get Lydia to say his name three times, he drops it but it’s hard to understand among the other people speaking.
The original script written by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson was much darker in tone as Betelgeuse was very violent and sinister. He wanted to kill Charles and Delia, and even succeeding, and basically sexually assaulting Lydia. Adam and Barbara’s deaths are more horrific. The script was rewritten with Wilson only retaining a “Story by” credit as McDowell and another writer Warren Skaaren was brought in to make it a lighter tone movie.
It also keeps Charles and Delia from becoming generic stereotypes. It’s easy to make them antagonistic. Charles wants to relax but soon realizes he can focus on changing the town while Delia is a “flake” artist who doesn’t realize it because no one has the ability to tell her until her agent (cameo by Dick Cavett) tells her so. Otho is more of an antagonistic character and it implies that he is the ringleader to Delia’s madness.
Made on a budget of only $15 which included only $1 million for special effects, Beetlejuice would almost $75 million at the box office and earned an Oscar for Best Make-up, which it so rightfully deserved. It would also get many positive reviews considering it subject matter. The movie’s success would change a lot in Hollywood. Burton went on to make Batman in 1989 with Keaton returning. Following this movie’s success, he was able to write his own ticket for the rest of his career mostly.
However, there have been reports that Burton has been prejudice and racist in his movies mainly with reports he demanded the main villain in Nightmare Before Christmas be called Oogie Boogie, a racial derogatory term. Burton also wanted Sammy Davis Jr. in the role of Betelgeuse as the character would speak in a more racial dialect. But Burton at least fault Warner Bros. executives over the movie’s title, who wanted to call it House Ghosts. As a joke, Burton suggested Scared Sheetless, which they actually considered before agreeing to stick with Beetlejuice.
The movie’s success led to Hollywood taking the horror comedy subgenre more seriously. Disney released Arachnophobia in the summer of 1990. Then, WB tried to duplicate the success with Dan Aykroyd’s Nothing but Trouble, which was recut from an R rating to a PG-13. But the movie was a failure even though it had a much bigger budget than Beetlejuice. Raimi would complete the Evil Dead trilogy with Army of Darkness, this time released by a major studio, Universal, which would also release the dark comedy Death Becomes Her.
But it seems it would take a little more time as the people who grew up on Beetlejuice and Evil Dead would go on to make Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, The Cabin in the Woods and This is the End, among others. Now, it seems more common for A-listers to appear in movies that mix guffaws with the gruesome. Some of them have been big failures, such as Idle Hands, which would’ve been what Beetlejuice would’ve been like in earlier scripts.
With a long-awaited sequel spending years in development hell finally set to hit theaters in September, time will tell if it measures up.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 