This week, Tim Burton‘s wild supernatural comedy “Beetlejuice” turns a whopping 25 years old. A funny/scary ode to both the potential liveliness of haunted houses and the deathly drudgery of everyday life, it stars Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis as the Maitlands, a pair of suburban Connecticut softies who, after their death in a tragi-comic automobile accident, have to try and spook the upper crust Manhattanites named the Deetzes who have taken up residence in their home (the all-star family consists of Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara as the parents and Winona Ryder as Lydia, their sullen daughter). Since they don’t have what it takes to scare away their new houseguests, they have to call on Betelgeuse (an unstoppable Michael Keaton), a self-styled “bio-exorcist,” to get rid of them. And all hell (quite literally) breaks loose.
“Beetlejuice” remains one of Tim Burton’s most fully realized, vibrantly stylized films – and one of his funniest, too. Released on March 30, 1988, the film proved to be a smash hit (the tenth biggest grossing of its year), won terrific reviews (no less than Pauline Kael called it “a comedy classic”), and helped Burton land the biggest job around, directing “Batman.” To commemorate the occasion, we’ve compiled a list of five things that you might not know about the endlessly quotable, wonderfully inventive “Beetlejuice.” And for more Tim Burton, here’s his “5 Essential Films,” 10 of His Unmade Movies and let’s not forget a reported sequel is on the way.
1. It Was Originally Meant To Be Way More Violent
While “Beetlejuice” is regularly trotted out as a successful example of the tonally tricky combination of horror and comedy, original versions of the story leaned much heavier on the former than the latter. Screenwriter Michael McDowell, who originally worked with Larry Wilson on the story (they were both replaced by Warren Skaaren at Burton’s behest – more on this in a minute) and who was a well-known and respected writer of paperback novels, originally conceived of the script as a much bleaker, more horror-driven piece. The original script featured a much more intense version of the Maitlands’ car crash (in this version Geena Davis‘ character’s arm gets smashed in graphic detail; subsequent drafts kept a reference to this), while the Betelgeuse character isn’t a charming (if skeezy) used car salesman of the undead; instead he was envisioned as leather-winged demon whose humanoid form is that of a squat Middle Eastern man (subsequent drafts had him talking in a kind of African American pidgin dialect).
There are superficial details that changed, like the deletion of a younger Deetz sister, named Cathy, who had the ability to see the Maitlands, but the main difference between the initial McDowell drafts and what came after was the tone – Betelgeuse isn’t interested in merely scaring the Maitlands but is, instead, a homicidal maniac, hellbent on murder and rape. Imagine: instead of that great climactic wedding sequence, where Betelgeuse tries to tie the knot with Lydia, it was replaced with one in which Betelgeuse attempts to rape Winona Ryder. Not exactly a crowd pleaser.
At the wildly popular MoMA Tim Burton exhibit from a few years ago, there were original versions of the script on display, complete with Tim Burton’s handwritten notes, which even then indicated the shift away from gory bleakness to a more light-hearted celebration of the macabre. Skaaren (who would go on to heavily rewrite Sam Hamm‘s original “Batman” script for Burton) added playfulness to the original “Beetlejuice” screenplay’s more existential dread (instead of a moon of Jupiter, the Maitlands would open the door and see giant gears grinding up the fabric of time against a pitiless black void). It was still more violent than what the movie ended up being, but you can see where everyone was headed.
McDowell, for his part, co-wrote (with Wilson) “The Jar,” the 1986 episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” that helped put Burton on the map (watch it below). And before McDowell’s tragic death in 1999, at the age of 49, due to complications related to AIDS, the two would work together again. Burton would call upon McDowell to help with the script for an ambitious stop motion project for Disney that would end up being the beloved “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”
