I caught Beetlejuice Beetlejuice later than I wanted to, but in this case, the wait made it better. In fact, the deeper we get into fall, the better it will play. This is amoviebest enjoyed when the air is chilly, the leaves have turned, and the jugs of apple cider have claimed their place of honor in the grocery store. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a lot of fun on its own (though it has an admittedly rickety script) but it’s even better when viewed as a worthy addition to the Halloween movie canon.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Has The Halloween Juice
Of course, the original Beetlejuice is plenty Halloween-y to begin with. Its leads are two recently deceased homeowners in an idyllic small town. Its title character is the ghost with the most whose black-and-white striped suit, caked-on makeup, green hair, and general sense of decay launched a thousand costumes. And its vision of the afterlife is filled with so many strange, ghoulish, practically realized creatures that Halloween movies would be struggling to catch up for decades after. I didn’t see Beetlejuice until I was an adult, but you don’t get most of the Halloween movies I loved as a kid without Beetlejuice leading the way.
So when I sat down to watch Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, I was very pleased to find a film I’ll happily throw on for many Octobers to come. It has so many of the things I want from a Halloween movie.
And when I say Halloween movie, I don’t mean horror movie. I lovehorror, but it’s never felt especially tied up with the season for me (perhaps because I indulged in the genre year round.) A Halloween movie, for me, captures the interplay between the scary and the playful that the season evokes. Halloween is a time when children dress up like monsters. It’s a time when we go to haunted houses to experience fear in a controlled setting (often with donuts and cider). It’s a time when kids go up to their neighbors' houses, which may be decorated with skeletons and tombstones and cobwebs, and receive free candy. The holiday exists on the knife’s edge between scary and fun, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does, too.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Brings The Body Horror As Comedy Bits
There’s gruesome stuff in the movie, but it’s always played for laughs. Charles Deetz was killed off for this movie (forvery understandable reasons) but is present in the afterlife as a walking corpse that, thanks to a shark attack, has no head. When he talks, it’s through his exposed aorta flapping like lips. It’s a good bit.
Similarly, when Beetlejuice first reunites with Lydia and her boyfriend, Rory, it’s on a psychiatrist’s couch, and he (playing the role of therapist) encourages them to spill their guts before ripping his stomach open to send organs flying like confetti. When Delores, Beetlejuice’s ex-wife, sucks the soul out of a victim, she compresses them into little raisin-like husks. All of that sounds really gorey, but in the film, it plays likeLooney Tunes, not torture porn.
It also is set around the holiday, which helps. Fall is falling throughout the movie, and the town has the perfect autumnal vibe as Astrid rides around its streets on her bicycle, with orange and red leaves on the trees and people milling about the streets. The movie’s climax hits on Halloween night, and that gives Lydia and Astrid’s misadventures in the afterlife a rush of seasonally specific excitement.
It all comes together to give the movie a great spooky season vibe, and Burton’s commitment to doing many of the film’s gags practically will give it a longer shelf life than many of its CGI-filled kin. It doesn’t look like it came out in the ’80s, but it looks better than the vast majority of legacy sequels. Like the Deetzes returning to Winter River, I suspect I won’t be able to leave Beetlejuice Beetlejuice behind for long.
