Beetlejuice

Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice keeps its title character offstage for a remarkably long time. Michael Keaton is on screen for roughly seventeen minutes of the film, and Keaton himself guessed the figure was twelve. Everything else belongs to two shy ghosts failing at haunting their own house, so anyone pressing play for Keaton spends the first half watching a different picture entirely. Of the fifteen million dollar budget, only one million went to visual effects, and Burton treated that ceiling as a style rather than a problem. The stop motion sandworms, the prosthetic faces and the puppetry are meant to look fake, copying the cheap horror pictures he grew up on. If you want polish, this is the wrong shelf. Michael McDowell’s first draft was considerably nastier. The crash was shown in full, and the character wanted to kill the Deetzes rather than scare them, and wanted sex from Lydia rather than marriage. The finished film took the Academy Award for Best Makeup. A good fit if an afterlife rendered as a waiting room with a caseworker and a handbook strikes you as the actual joke, paperwork before fright. Not a fit if handmade, deliberately clumsy effects read to you as sloppiness, or if you were planning to sit a small child down in front of it.