beetlejuice

what the film does

adam and barbara maitland are a sweet, boring couple who die in a car accident and return to their beloved country home as ghosts. they discover a handbook for the recently deceased and learn they are stuck in the house for 125 years. when the deetz family buys the place, new york real estate developer charles, his talentless sculptor wife delia, and their goth teenage daughter lydia, the maitlands try to scare them out. they are terrible at it. they are invisible to charles and delia. lydia, however, can see them.

desperate, the maitlands summon betelgeuse, a crude, unhinged bio-exorcist who can only be called by saying his name three times. betelgeuse is more dangerous than the living family they are trying to evict. he possesses a banister and turns it into a giant snake. he teleports adam into the town model and barbara to a saturn moon full of sandworms. he tries to marry lydia so he can stay in the living world permanently.

the maitlands and lydia banish him together, with help from a sandworm barbara rides back through the front door. the living and the dead agree to share the house. betelgeuse ends up in the afterlife waiting room, his head shrunk by a witch doctor whose ticket he tried to steal.

why it is in the canon

burton made a film that is equal parts horror, comedy, and art project. the practical effects, the stop-motion sandworms, the makeup that won the academy award. keaton is on screen for only 17 minutes but owns every frame. the calypso possession scene at the dinner party, where shrimp cocktails come to life and everyone dances to harry belafonte against their will, is one of the funniest sequences in any film. the afterlife bureaucracy, a waiting room full of ghosts who died in increasingly absurd ways, is a joke that keeps giving. the model town, where adam builds a miniature version of winter river and betelgeuse later traps him inside it, is a metaphor for burton’s whole approach to set design: a world you can hold in your hand, then step into.