The Only Recap You Need Before Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

Betelgeuse. Betelgeuse. Betel — okay, let’s stop right there. We know what happens when you say the man’s name thrice, and we wouldn’t want this article to get too out of hand. Then again, many readers may not know anything about Betel — er, the Betel guy — and might need a recap before venturing into Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” the belated sequel to his 1988 comedy/horror classic. Don’t worry, kids, we’ve got you covered.

For starters, the original “Beetlejuice” stars Alec Baldwin (who thought the film would ruin his career), Geena Davis, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, and Michael Keaton, and follows a young couple who perish in an automobile accident and return to their home as ghosts only to discover they must share the place with some unruly new occupants. Hoping to rid their house of these unwanted guests, our naive heroes turn to a demented demon named Betelgeuse (Keaton) and, in a classic case of ’80s comedy, get more than they bargained for.

Directed by Burton before “Batman” made him a household name, “Beetlejuice” is a visually sumptuous, darkly comedic gothic fantasy that scored big at the box office and drew praise from critics and audiences. Here’s to hoping the sequel improves upon its predecessor, delivers clever practical effects and another memorable soundtrack by Danny Elfman, and results in modern comedy classic.

Now, let’s turn up the juice and see what shakes loose with the only recap you need before “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”

As mentioned above, “Beetlejuice” opens with a look at Barbara (Davis) and Adam Maitland (Baldwin) enjoying a quiet life in Winter River, Connecticut. They’re old-fashioned, decent folks, prone to spending vacations fixing up their dusty country home, avoiding pesky neighbors, and occasionally rushing out to run an errand or two in the nearby town. We don’t learn much about their personal lives, though it’s hinted that Barbara has not been able to bear children, an aspect that plays into her relationship with Lydia Deetz (Ryder) later in the film. Adam, meanwhile, represents the nerdy everyman and enjoys fidgeting with his massive Winter River model in the attic — a symbol of his unyielding love for his home and the surrounding community.  

One day, the pair heads to a local store for modeling supplies. During the return journey, they swerve to avoid hitting a dog, drive off a bridge, and drown in the river below, a dark end to a bright, joyous life. Hours later, they return home, aware of the accident but unaware of their current condition. Barbara eventually deduces that they perished in the accident and are now ghosts. Adam initially balks at the idea and tries to retrace their steps only to find himself somehow transported to the Saturn moon, Titan, home to a giant, black-and-white striped Sandworm. They manage to escape but quickly realize they are trapped in their home, a problem that intensifies when the new owners move in.

Meet the Deetzes: Charles (Jeffrey Jones), a real estate agent seeking reprieve from his bustling lifestyle; his overbearing second wife, Delia (O’Hara), whose taste in art is almost as bad as her parenting skills; and their ghoulish teenage daughter Lydia (Ryder), a young girl fixated on all things death. Together, they make a strange yet atypical ’80s family with clashing personalities, communication problems, and artistic differences. Problems arise when Delia and her interior designer, Otho (Glenn Shadix), begin remodeling the Maitlands’ home, drawing the ire of our jovial couple and consequently forcing them to use their powers of immortality to drive the Deetzes away.

Oddly, Lydia is the only one in her family with the power to see them, forming an unlikely friendship. She’s transfixed by their situation and agrees to help them drive her parents away. Unfortunately, Charles and Delia are more intrigued by the spirits, particularly after a supernatural episode involving the “Banana Boat (Day-O)” song, and view them as a lucrative financial opportunity. Charles reverts to his real estate ways and envisions turning his home into an attraction substantial enough to attract outside businesses, while Delia hopes the media attention will propel her artistry to mainstream success. The feud drives Lydia further away from her parents, making her long to join the Maitlands on the other side. That’s where the fun really begins.

After their attempts to drive the Deetzes away from their home fails, Adam and Barbara look elsewhere for guidance. Utilizing their spiritual manual, “The Handbook for the Recently Deceased,” Adam creates a mystical passage to the Land of the Dead, aka the Neitherworld. However, this afterlife doesn’t feature bright sunbeams erupting from puffy white clouds. Lest you forget, Tim Burton is directing the chaos, so the other side is a peculiar arena overfilled with kooky, dead characters that met various gruesome fates working in cramped office spaces or loitering in dimly lit waiting rooms. In this universe, death for many people is merely an extension of the misery they endured while alive.

Note the short-tempered clerk with a Miss Argentina banner around her neck. Her pale blue skin suggests she took her own life after not winning the crown and must now work as a bureaucrat until the powers that be set her free. “If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had my little accident,” she says.

Burton’s afterlife doesn’t make much sense, specifically the part about the Maitlands being forced to remain in their home for 125 years. (Will they go to Heaven once their time expires? Why is there so much paperwork and red tape? But I digress.) Realizing their predicament, Adam and Barbara call on a nearby demon for support.

It’s not until 50 minutes into “Beetlejuice” that we finally meet our titular “Ghost with the Most.” To be fair, Burton sprinkles moments of Keaton’s crazy ghoul throughout the opening act, notably in a hilariously low-budget cowboy commercial and a strange sequence that pays tribute to 1958’s “The Fly.” These bits are enough to cause apprehension about Betelgeuse, a feeling multiplied several times over when Juno explains his backstory. 

“He was my assistant, but he was a troublemaker,” Juno explains. “Went out on his own as a freelance bio-exorcist. Claimed he could get rid of the living. Got into more trouble.” She reveals that Betelgeuse currently resides in Adam’s town model, waiting for someone dumb or desperate enough to say his name three times.

As it turns out, the Maitlands decide to take the risk. Except, instead of a dangerous, demonic monster, they unearth a perverted, wise-cracking clown. Thankfully, they only release him from his resting place, but they don’t actually unleash him on the world — that requires saying his name three more times. Instead, the Maitlands (playfully) attack the Deetzes themselves. When their ploy doesn’t work, Betelgeuse disguises himself as a giant snake and nearly murders Lydia’s family before Barbara sends him back to the model, setting the stage for a wild third act.

Following their meeting with Juno, the Maitlands use their supernatural powers to contort their faces in a last-ditch effort to scare away the Deetzes. En route to the big scare, however, they have a change of heart and decide to share their home with the Deetzes. This decision is enough to pull a depressed and lonely Lydia back from the brink of taking her own life. Moments earlier, she nearly made a deal with Betelgeuse: in exchange for setting him free, he would take her to the Neitherworld to find the Maitlands. “No, Lydia, we’re dead,” Barbara says in a surprising moment of reflection. “Being dead really doesn’t make things easier.”

Around this time, Otho discovers Adam’s handbook and uses it to perform a seance to impress the Deetzes and their high-profile, financially loaded guests. Adam and Barbara suddenly vanish from the attic, reappear in the middle of the ritual, and unexpectedly begin to rapidly decay. As Lydia watches in horror, Otho struggles to find a solution. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s too late.”

Panicked, Lydia turns to the one person who can save her friends: Betelgeuse.

With time running out, Lydia rushes to Adam’s model and finds Betelgeuse perched atop a tombstone. He agrees to help the Maitlands in return for Lydia’s hand in marriage, an action that would permit him to exist unabated in the real world. At least, that’s our interpretation, as the script never thoroughly explains Betelgeuse’s motivations. A deal is struck, Lydia says the three magic words, and Betelgeuse unleashes supernatural havoc.

He hurls the Deetzes’ big city pals through the ceiling, stops the Maitlands’ exorcism, and defrocks Otho before turning his attention to Lydia. A reverend from the Neitherworld arrives, a red dress magically appears on Lydia, and the wedding commences.

Rejuvenated, Barbara and Adam try to intervene, apparently needing only to say Betelgeuse’s name three additional times to banish him back to his prison. Betelgeuse uses a plethora of tricks to prevent them from speaking and eventually transports them to separate locations. Adam winds up miniaturized in the town model, while Barbara finds herself staring down a Sandworm on Titan. Thinking quickly, Adam hops inside a model truck and drives into Betelgeuse’s foot, distracting him long enough for a Sandworm (ridden by Barbara) to smash through the roof and devour him.

An epilogue sees the Deetzes and the still-deceased Maitlands living harmoniously while Betelgeuse (for unexplained reasons) returns to the Neitherworld waiting room. Everyone lip syncs and dances to “Day-O” in the Maitland/Deetz house. Meanwhile, a voodoo magician shrinks Betelgeuse’s head, and all is right with the two worlds.

“Beetlejuice” scared up $74.7 million at the worldwide box office in 1988 against a $15 million budget (via The Numbers) and was a big enough hit to prompt the Geffen Company and Warner Bros. to pursue sequel ideas. Following his work on “Batman,” Burton ordered a script titled “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian,” which sees the bio-exorcist follow the Deetz clan to the tropics of Hawaii, where he awakens an evil spirit and participates in a surfing contest. You can actually read Jonathan Gems’ bonkers script online. Burton was fascinated at the prospect of combining his dark German Expressionism style with a cheesy 1960s beach movie aesthetic.

Unfortunately, according to Wicked Horror, Warner Bros. passed over “Beetlejuice 2” in favor of “Batman Returns,” but that didn’t stop Burton from further developing his wacky concept. Throughout the 1990s, he commissioned several writers, including Kevin Smith, to rewrite Gems’ script, but the project never gained much momentum.

Still, Warner Bros. and Burton pressed on, repeatedly circling back to the sequel over the last several decades. You can view the slew of “Beetlejuice” sequel news in the Slashfilm archives dating all the way back to 2011, when we reported that “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” author Seth Grahame-Smith was attached to the project. For better or worse, “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian” never saw the light of day, but it at least paved the way for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” nearly 40 years later.

While the big-screen “Beetlejuice” sequel languished in development hell, Burton teamed with Warner Bros. Television to create an animated series loosely based on the original film. Featuring the voices of Stephen Ouimette, Alyson Court, Elizabeth Hanna, and Roger Dunn, “Beetlejuice” ran on ABC and FOX from 1989-91 and reimagined the film’s concept into a kid-friendly adventure. In this iteration, Lydia and Beetlejuice are pals who spend their days exploring the Neitherworld, where they run into all sorts of outlandish ghosts and goblins. Lydia’s parents, Charles and Delia, also appear, though the Maitlands are curiously absent. 

Indeed, the cartoon looks and sounds like “Beetlejuice,” especially with Danny Elfman’s bouncy title theme, but so many film elements are changed that fans view it as more of an alternate universe. “The afterlife of the film’s universe and the Neitherworld of the cartoon universe appear to be completely different,” wrote Reddit user TrashJack42. Uniquely, the “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” trailers show Lydia teaming up with our favorite demon and traveling to the Neitherworld. Is this Burton’s way of tying the animated series into the cinematic world? 

Judging by the trailers, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” picks up years after the original and once again centers on the Deetz family’s struggles with the pesky poltergeist. Charles, it seems, has passed away, leaving his wife, daughter, and granddaughter (played by Jenna Ortega, whose collaboration with Burton on Netflix’s “Wednesday” made “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” possible) in mourning. From what I gather, Astrid (Ortega) gets stuck in the Neitherworld, prompting Lydia to call on Betelgeuse for help. We also see glimpses of a vengeful spirit named Delores (Monica Bellucci), who may or may not be the owner of that finger Betelgeuse pulled from his pockets during the wedding scene in the first film.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” also features several nods to the original, notably Betelgeuse’s with shrunken heads — a result of magic employed by Harry the Hunter in the final scene of the first film — Sandworms galore, a dance sequence, stop-motion animation, a callback to the “can you be scary” gag and more. Willem Dafoe also plays a detective in the afterlife, who used to be a B-movie actor in the real world.

Can “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” capture the silly charm of the 1988 classic and stand comfortably alongside Burton’s best works? We’re not sure, but so long as Burton delivers a decent followup that caters to franchise fans, everyone will hopefully go home singing “Day-O.”