31 Days, 31 Screams: Resurrection- Day 29 (Beetlejuice)

I probably shouldn't be covering this specifically, in terms of a nostalgic thing I remember from my childhood. If we were going to go from that angle tonight, I'd have to be doing the animated series, which I watched every Saturday and found to be a totally irreverent and strange thing that nonetheless entertained me, even if it was all full of puns that would make one groan. No, instead I dusted off a Beetlejuce DVD (which had three of the cartoon episodes on it anyway as extras) and fired up a weird Tim Burton movie. Oh, Tim. You're a filmmaker whose work I... kind of like, sometimes? I enjoy your Batman movies, but if we're going to be honest with my nostalgia then the sheer joy of seeing Batman Forever when I was 10 kind of beats you out. The best thing the Tim Burton films did, in my eyes, was inspire Bruce Timm to make his own cartoon. See, there I go, tying it all back to how I should be talking about the cartoon adaptations instead of the movies. Okay. Look. Let's get back on track with the rambling, for just a bit. This movie's fine. It has its issues and I'll get to those, but I get the vibe it's going for and the vibe it's going for is pretty neat in places! Let's discuss those places.


Funny enough, other pieces of media were jingling in my head as I watched this film. It's impossible for one of them to be an inspiration for this, given it came 30 years later, but the other could have been rattling in Tim Burton's head as he came up with it. I speak, of course, of both Zombie Land Saga and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Stick with me here. When I wrote up Zombie Land Saga, I called it a piece of reverse dissonance: an absolutely horrific premise played as a comedy. That's the same tone I get from Beetlejuice: we get to know the Maitlands over the course of a few minutes, they're a happy couple, everything's going great, and then they fucking die. They're dead! Instead of shambling reanimated corpses, we have the restless spirits of once-living people. It's a ghost story, yeah, but played as morbid comedy. Death is played for laughs here, and that's where we get to the Douglas Adams parallels. The afterlife of this film's setting is so utterly bureaucratic that it's hard not to think of Adams here. The Maitlands die and all they're left is a confusing handbook written in befuddling jargon, rather than explaining the rules of their spiritual life straightforwardly. There's waiting rooms and queues and goddamn offices on the other side. Death is no peaceful repose, it's an eternity of stressful working as a fucking office clerk for dead people. Holy shit. Maybe that's hell. Working in a fucking office for all time. It was enough for our title character to go off and become a goddamned freelancer, so there we go. Actually let's talk about him and some other stuff before we go.


He's some kind of huckster, obviously, advertising himself like some sort of anti-Ghostbuster, all flash and panache and supernatural TV ads. He's also just kind of the worst, which surprised me from my memories of the cartoon show. Sure, he was kind of a jerk and a prankster, but this movie guy is outright fucking terrible. Especially to women. Let us just say that certain aspects of this movie have not aged well. Especially the climax of trying to marry Winona Ryder to like, get out of being dead or whatever. This comes out of nowhere, is also kind of resonant with the idea of death's rules and regulations not being explained to you, and is really gross. Speaking of gross, Jeffrey Jones is in this. Eugh. What I find interesting is Delia Deetz's weird abstract idea of modern art, and how it both kind of fits the Tim Burton aesthetic and is also treated with some derision by like everyone else. Weird. That, I guess, is a good place to leave off with this one. It has some wild stop-motion stuff in it (because Tim Burton), some good ideas, some bad ones. Yeah, it's like... fine, I guess. Really it just makes me wish I were watching the nostalgic cartoon. I may have watched the wrong Beetlejuice tonight. NO SHIT WAIT--