Bringing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice back from the grave

In 1988, director Tim Burton’s (The Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) horror comedy movie Beetlejuice became our guide to a colourful and weirdly bureaucratic version of the afterlife. 

We watched teenaged goth Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder, The Plot Against America) explore her family’s new haunted house as her artist stepmother Delia Deetz (The Last of Us star Catherine O’Hara, who married the original Beetlejuice production designer Bo Welch after they met on set and Tim Burton made him ask her out) frantically tried to make it over to match her modernist vision. 

And while they made themselves at home, the sleazy demon Betelgeuse (pronounced Beetlejuice, and played by Michael Keaton, Goodrich, Spider-Man: Homecoming) tried to break out of the underworld and into the real world via the model of the town of Winter River that the house’s previous owners, the Maitlands, built in the house’s attic. His goal? To marry Lydia so that he could claim his place among the living. 

Thirty-six years later, (nearly) the whole cast is back in for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – along with Lydia’s creepy ghost talk show producer (and boyfriend), Rory (Justin Theroux, The Leftovers), and her rebellious daughter Astrid Deetz (Jenna Ortega, American Carnage), who doesn’t believe that her mom can see dead people. 

“You’re an interesting teenager. What happens when you become an adult?” asks Tim Burton. “Do you have children? What are your relationships like? What have you become? Things happen to all of us as we get older and change – relationships, children – all those things. That was the nucleus of it for me that got me back interested in it – what happened to the Deetz family.”

We’ve cracked open our new edition of the Handbook for the Recently Deceased to find out how Tim Burton and his creative team brought Beetlejuice back, and what we can look out for – including a who’s who of Hollywood populating the afterlife after their characters suffer bizarre deaths like being eaten by piranhas (Santiago Cabrera), blown up by a grenade (Willem Dafoe), or axe murdered (Monica Bellucci). But be warned. Say his name out loud just one more time, and Betelgeuse will appear. 

Stream Beetlejuice Beetlejuice now, and watch the OG movie Beetlejuice.

Rebuilding Winter River – large and small

Production designer Mark Scruton wanted to stick closely to Bo Welch’s Beetlejuice groundwork, and that meant going back to the first Winter River location in East Corinth, Vermont. “One very snowy day, we all flew out, went up to Vermont, and stood on a very cold hill two-feet-deep in snow and decided that we absolutely had to rebuild the house and re-create the town as faithfully as we could,” says Mark. 

Producer Tommy Harper adds, “We toured the town with Tim in winter, and people came out of their homes to talk about the original film. We heard stories of the past. It was a very important moment in the history of the town, and people feel really connected to Beetlejuice. There are people there that will show you pictures from the original film with the cast sitting on their front lawn, and then show a picture of us sitting on their front lawn. It was a special moment to be back there.”

Memories weren’t enough for Mark to work on, though. “We had drawings and models in the Warner Bros archive that we could draw on. Other times, it really was a forensic effort, literally going frame by frame through the movie and trying to find out how they achieved things – certain finishes, certain looks – specifically with the model in the attic set. There were no drawings or references for that other than the film. We literally had to pick it apart and figure it all out from the ground up,” he explains.

For Winter River, Mark’s team built a full-sized version of the Deetz house exterior, along with a new covered bridge mimicking the original (but larger, as the road had been widened), the store, schoolhouse, and the streets where Astrid rides her bike. And when the Warner Bros archives came up short on pics of the original Deetz house, one of Mark Scruton’s team came across an old production account on the online photo platform Flickr, which featured photos that were taken while they were shooting in 1987 that neither Tim Burton nor Mark had ever seen before. These provided the art department with a window into how the house was built and shot as a shell, with only two finished sides. 

As Mark sees it, the Deetz family have owned the Winter River house for 35 years now, during which they have come to a fair balance between the ghostly previous owners, the Maitlands, and Delia’s avant garde sensibilities. So while the exterior, floor plan, and features like the staircases and fireplaces have gone back to their farmhouse roots, Delia has put her stamp on the interiors, with furniture sourced from a high-end modernist design studio based in New York.  

A vision for the Afterlife

So much for the real world. Meanwhile in the Afterlife, even the Waiting Room where the recently deceased sit to be processed will look eerily familiar. “Tim was quite specific on some tweaks he wanted to make on it, so it wasn’t quite as simple as recreating it,” reveals Mark. “We had the original set drawings for it, which was a really good start. It revealed some things we hadn’t realised – including that the set was on a really steep inclined angle, which didn’t come across at all in the first film. We added a second service hatch, which was detailed in the script. We made a few other tweaks that clearly Tim had wanted to make for more than 30 years, but they were very minor in the end. Everything was copied as closely as we could, right down to making the table lamps from scratch and copying the furniture and artwork.” 

Mark turned to some classic inspirations for new spaces and architecture like Afterlife detective Wolf Jackson’s (Willem Dafoe) office, the train platform, which was one of the largest sets constructed and featured a functional train running through it, and the immigration room, which featured a wall of filing cabinets stacked to infinity (using VFX to complete the look). 

“German Expressionism was the main influence for the film in the beginning,” reveals Mark. “Then there was a Russian experimental movie from 1924 called Aelita Queen of Mars. It has some really interesting ideas of science fiction, which were just sort of crazy, along with these deconstructed environments, which were really inspiring. We also looked at some of the B movies of the 1950s as well, along with some 1960s brutalism and modernism.”

The bizzarchitecture of the Afterlife that we see on screen was echoed on the sets themselves. ”It became a game of chess to shoehorn everything into the spaces we had. We had five soundstages at Leavesden. It was 68 sets that we had to constantly change and redress, move or have ready. We were sort of always chasing each other around. It was a logistics effort as much as anything else to get everything in camera,” reveals Mark.

Costumes to die for

Costume designer Colleen Atwood took inspiration from Aggie Rodgers’ iconic costumes, like the striped suit and maroon prom tuxedo for Betelgeuse, or Lydia’s red lace wedding gown, but gave them her own spin. “Michael (Keaton) really wanted to see the original tux. So, Warner Bros archives gave it to me, we looked at it, then we kind of moved on. He really liked the tux more as his character than the stripes, even though the audience loves the other thing. We did a fitting at his house. After he put it on, he was like, ‘Oh, yeah!’ And we got the (fake) belly out – because he’s in quite good shape, and Beetlejuice is not – and we gave him a stomach, and he was back in Beetlejuice.”

It was dressing the dead people that really presented Colleen with some challenges. “You’re doing a dress for a dead person – she has a saw through her middle, or a sword through her body, or there’s some other thing going on – and you’re interfacing with visual effects people and making things work that look good for them and for you that actually have to function. So, there’s a lot of challenges in the scale of design that this movie encompasses,” she explains. 

Among the most curious of these were the Shrinkers – based on the original film’s explorer character, who had a shrunken head thanks to a run-in with a witchdoctor. He was brought back to life, along with some friends, by animatronic and special make-up effects supervisor Neal Scanlan. “That moment is burnt into my memory forevermore,” says Neal. “What we did want to do is to get them off the sofa and get them walking. In fact, we did a test with Tim where we had one riding a bicycle. The costume department did a tremendous job in redefining the anatomy using slightly larger shoulders, slightly larger collars. It’s a brilliant sort of massaging of the human form.”

The Shrinkers’ heads are animatronics, with mouths and eyes controlled by puppeteers. So all the performers who played Shrinkers were all around five foot, six inches tall, so that their final height, when topped by their shrunken heads, was around six foot. The costumes covered the performers’ real heads and faces, so Colleen concealed mesh in the shirts to allow the performers to see out at around chest level. 

“I can’t wait to see the movie. I plan to love it,” says Catherine O’Hara. “There are just so many wild, and wildly original, visuals in this movie, based on original ideas. People have such expectations, because they loved the first. Such expectations. And it’s going to live up to every single one of them.”

Stream Beetlejuice Beetlejuice now, and watch the OG movie Beetlejuice.