Geena Davis (left) as Barbara Maitland, Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice and Alec Baldwin as Adam Maitland are outside their quaint farmhouse in the fictitious town of Wild River, Connecticut. (Courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Screen Time gives “Beetlejuice” (1988) a Melodious Thumbs Up for its entertaining adaptation of a timeless ghost story, but its predatory tropes have not aged well.
Screen Time with Melodie Miller is a review column that looks beyond the trailer and connects audiences to movie perspectives.
Each year, harvest season and dark nights came to an end. Bonfires were lit, costumes donned and treats set out, a custom of offering hospitality to entities and ancestors who lived beyond the veil in the Netherworld. This was Samhain, a 2nd-century CE Gaelic ritual practiced in ancient northern Europe before winter’s threat began. It was a celebration that shaped Halloween and historical ghost stories.
The Victorian Gothic farmhouse in the fictitious town of Wild River, Connecticut. (Courtesy of Warner Bros.)
In award-winning director Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice” (1988), the ghosts of Adam Maitland, an amiable model-town-building hobbyist, played by Alec Baldwin, and Barbara Maitland, the benevolent homemaker of a 19th-century Victorian Gothic farmhouse, played by Geena Davis, receive no such offerings. Instead, property developer Charles Deetz, played by Jeffrey Jones and his wife, Delia Deetz, (Catherine O’Hara), purchase the house haunted by the deceased couple and proceed to gut it. The Deetz family turn the once-idyllic utopia into a macabre arthouse, then gorge on their desire for wealth and abundance. Next comes the agent of chaos: Beetlejuice, the freelance ghost for hire and the film’s most memorable—and troubling—creation.
“Beetlejuice,” set in the fictional bucolic Winter River, Connecticut, remains a charmingly crafted ghost story, from character arcs to costumes to the setting, whose irony has sharpened over the years. The predatory realtors, developers and deal-makers circling the Maitlands’ home forecast a future America reshaped by billionaire power brokers. The film’s central theme is “never trust the living.” The living adults all have something to sell, dismantle, or exploit.
What hasn’t survived is the humor in the film’s lewd lampooning. What passed for satire in 1988 has become unpalatable today. Where the jokes falter, visual imagery and behavior draw a clear boundary between the predator and the innocent. Burton builds the moral divide between Beetlejuice and the Maitlands first through costuming.
Alec Baldwin as Adam Maitland and Geena Davis as Barbara Maitland stare in disbelief at the human inhabitants who have taken over their dream house. (Courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Baldwin, the affable Adam, dressed in a buffalo-check woodcutter’s shirt and starched khaki pants that scream “Twilight Zone” dollhouse characterization, spends his vacation gleefully dawdling in his attic with his Winter River village replica. Davis as Barbara wears a “Little House on the Prairie” calico-print dress with gathered mutton sleeves. Barbara is portrayed as innocent and guileless. The couple is childlike, void of sexual energy in all their personal interactions.
The Maitlands evoke Adam and Eve, trusting, pure and naïve, in stark contrast to Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice, a lecherous, decaying trickster whose salacious, bull-legged swagger, descended belly, and all-too-tight trousers accentuate the characters’ every verbal and metaphorical sexual indecency.
Bo Welch’s production design extends the moral divide to the farmhouse, setting the Maitlands’ respectable Victorian home against the warped expressionist perspective of the remodeled interior designed by Otho Fenlock, the bombastic know-it-all interior designer played by Glenn Shadix.
Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz realizes something strange is happening in the attic of her new house.” (Courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Inside the remodeled house, only one living person is worth trusting. In her breakout role, Winona Ryder embodies Lydia Deetz, a 1980s teenager preoccupied with the supernatural and the ghosts only she can see. Ryder is exceptional as a brooding nihilist who dresses entirely in black and believes life holds no meaning. The Maitlands persuade Lydia otherwise and become guardians of her well-being. That bond becomes a bargaining tool for Beetlejuice.
Keaton is brilliant in his role as an underworld charlatan, but the character’s seductive, predatory behavior feels dated, leaving audiences to wonder whether they ever found this type of humor funny. His propositions to Barbara and his coerced proposal to Lydia were inappropriate in 1988, but today they read as harassment.
Michael Keaton as Beetlejuice has coerced Winona Ryder as Lydia Deetz to the wedding altar. (Courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Beetlejuice is not the only predator in Winter River, and the first arrives as the annoying, insincere Jane Butterfield, played by Annie McEnroe. At the dawn of Adam’s vacation, Jane stalks him with an offer to sell his home, his sanctuary, to a New York buyer who has only seen a photograph. Jane wants to sell the house, but Otho intends to erase its essence.
Delia demands an entire reimagining of the Victorian house and Otho is eager to oblige. He is determined to strip the house of all its virtuous charm and create the perfect lair for Keaton’s homicidal Beetlejuice snake character.
Delia and Otho’s ambitions stop at the property line, but not so with Charles, who announces he could “buy the whole town.” In 1988, the line was a satirical punchline, but in 2026, it becomes an ironic rebuke of modern-day American plutocrats, compelled to buy up everything within their reach.
Jeffrey Jones as Charles Deetz and Catherine O’Hara as Delia Deetz sit outside enjoying the remodel of the Victorian house. (Courtesy of Warner Bros.)
Maxie Dean, an investor played by Robert Goulet, shares this appetite for acquisition with Charles. Their plan to turn a grieving town into a paranormal theme park foreshadows an era in which tech billionaires and political power brokers treat entire communities as raw material.
Against that appetite, the 2nd-century CE Gaelic Samhain festival that honored the dead reads as a rebuke to the predatory living in the film. The Gaels were hospitable and gifted the non-living in exchange for serenity. In “Beetlejuice,” only the dead Maitlands keep the peace. The living, apart from Lydia, are the ghouls.
Keaton’s performance makes the horror-comedy worth watching even as some of his character’s behavior has soured with time. The film’s message is as sharp now as in 1988: never trust the living or the mischievous dead.
Screen Time gives “Beetlejuice” a Melodious Thumbs Up for its inventive plot, art design and sharp satire, with a caveat: the title character’s carnal predatory persona has aged out of the comic spectrum.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Melodie Miller at Melodie.Miller@colorado.edu.
