In an old house on a hill overlooking a small town, two clans clash: on one side, the previous occupants, recently deceased but still attached to the place, and on the other, a couple of yuppies determined to transform the place. And there is this oddball, who emerges from the afterlife when his name is pronounced three times and who claims to be able to hunt the living for the benefit of the dead: Beetlejuice. Released in 1988, the film of the same name allowed Tim Burton to impose his imagination as fanciful as it is macabre. A week before the release of Beetlejuice Beetlejuicea sequel that we no longer hoped for, the moment is ideal to “exhume” the original.
Certainly, before Beetlejuice (Betelgeuse), Tim Burton had directed Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure). Except that, in this first feature film, the universe of the character created by Paul Reubens was already established, and the director’s creative room for maneuver was limited.
As Mark Salisbury sums up in the book Burton on Burton, Beetlejuice turned out to be a timely proposition: ” [Burton] had started working on a script for Batman at Warner Bros. with screenwriter Sam Hamm, but while the studio was willing to pay for the script’s development, it was less willing to greenlight the project. Meanwhile, Burton had begun reading the scripts he had been sent [après Pee-Wee] and quickly became discouraged by their lack of imagination and originality. Until music industry mogul turned film producer David Geffen […] give him a script entitled Beetlejuicewritten by Michael McDowell, who had written that of The Jar [épisode de la série Alfred Hitchcock Presents réalisé par Burton]. »
The description offered by the screenwriter appealed to the filmmaker, namely that Beetlejuice was intended to be “a comforting film about death.”
“In retrospect, it was the epitome of Burton’s cinema: lurid, bizarre, highly imaginative and with the potential for extravagant staging and innovative special effects,” Salisbury notes.
In this regard, Beetlejuice deploys an unusual bestiary, from passages in retro stop-motion animation (Burton’s first love) to sequences set in limbo. In these, we discover that people who have taken their own lives become civil servants for eternity, not to mention the waiting room populated by the dead with the most colorful looks.
Illustrated with less (black) humor and fantasy, these concepts could have been gloomy. However, it is quite the opposite.
Although the script was initially devoid of a comic component, this came in later versions. When Burton agreed to direct the film, he collaborated with McDowell to further increase this aspect.
In Burton on Burtonthe filmmaker remembers how the studio was wary of such eccentricity: “We worked on the script for a long time […] Michael McDowell and producer Larry Wilson worked on the script for a while, but eventually grew discouraged by the constant second-guessing. Most of the time, on BeetlejuiceI felt like I was giving evidence in court. I remember sitting in script meetings that could last twenty-four hours over two days, and at the end we were questioning every element of the script, which, to me, is not necessarily that productive.”
But Burton held firm, and was eventually able to impose his vision. Starloghe confided in 1988: “It’s hard to describe this film as one thing. There are horror elements, but it’s not really scary, and it’s funny, but it’s not really a comedy. Beetlejuice is one of those films that doesn’t fit into any box.”
Special brilliance
For the account, it is on Beetlejuice that the filmmaker refined, and affirmed, this singular balance between the funny and the sinister. In bud in his short films Vincent (1982) and Frankenweenie (1984), this then became an intrinsic component of his cinema: see Edward Scissorhands (Edward Scissorhands), The Nightmare Before Christmas (The Nightmare Before Christmas), Ed Woodor even Sleepy Hollow (Sleepy Hollow, the legend of the headless horseman).
“If there is darkness, there should be color and light. Beetlejuice was for me a real mix of color and darkness, and I wanted to tone down the darker aspects and make them a little more colorful,” the director says in Burton on Burton.
In his work dedicated to the filmmaker, Antoine de Baecque thus summarises the opposition described by Burton, which was able to really flourish in Beetlejuice.
“The primary force of Beetlejuice is based on a series of seemingly impossible marriages: the macabre and laughter, horror and the grotesque, the daily chronicle and expressionism, the terror of death and the surrealism of the animated sequences. Burton holds the two contradictory ends of these connections and makes them take shape with a particular brilliance.
In his own book on Tim Burton, Aurélien Ferenczi adds: “ Beetlejuice goes to the end of a logic that systematically reverses traditional situations and values: a good kick to the ambient “normality”. Judge for yourself: here, it is not about terrified living people looking for an exorcist to free them from evil ghosts, but about a young couple who recently died trying to chase away the cumbersome and very lively family who have settled in their pretty house in New England. Learning to haunt, getting rid of beings in full health, not possessed at all, is the job of a low-level “bio-exorcist”, almost a crook, baptized Beetlejuice…”
And to conclude: “ [le film] always surprises, both by its visual richness and by its sense of joyful terror. Tim Burton puts into practice an idea that will never leave him: laughter and fear are very close emotions, and it is interesting to pass, impromptu, from one to the other…
Falling at the right time
At the time, critics celebrated the novel visual world created by Tim Burton and Michael Keaton’s irreverent performance in the title role. Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, very funny as the deceased couple, also received good words.
However, it is Winona Ryder (Stranger Things), as a gothic teenager who instantly became iconic, and Catherine O’Hara (Schitt’s Creek), as a dilettante artist mother-in-law, who stole the show.
Like Keaton, both are back for the long-awaited sequel, with the added bonus of series star Jenna Ortega. Wednesday (Wednesday)… directed by Tim Burton.
That being said, perhaps the most beautiful thing about it Beetlejuice Beetlejuiceis that this late continuation seems, like the original film, to fall at the right time in Tim Burton’s career. In fact, at Varietythe latter recently admitted to having thought about retiring after the unpleasant experience of the film Dumbo (2019), revealing that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice had “re-energized” it. I can’t wait for it to result in a completely unbridled film again.
The movie Beetlejuice is available in VOD on most platforms. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hits theaters on September 6.