In this episode we discussed Beetlejuice, directed by Tim Burton.

Here is a link to the Cardiacs song Dog Like Sparky.

Here's a link to a very short Jan Svankmejer short (not vegan).

If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is stillscaredpodcast@gmail.com.

Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, find her work at makiyamazaki.com

Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and his band Etao Shin are at etaoshin.co.uk

Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find her work at behance.net/lettydraws

Transcript

Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray, and today we’re going to be talking about the 1988 film Beetlejuice, directed by Tim Burton. Enjoy.

(Theme tune plays)

Ren: Good evening!

Adam: Hoy hoy.

Ren: So this topic was sort of a last minute choice because my William Sleator books have taken a long time to get to me. So I’m sure it will arrive before our next one, but not in time for this one.

So, Beetlejuice might not be an obvious choice for children’s horror?

Adam: I was thinking about this, but then it’s not really an obvious choice for adult horror either.

Ren: No, it’s sort of a middle.

Adam: Like, it’s one of those curious ‘80s films, and the ‘80s seemed to do this in particular, where you really don’t know what the target audience was. Which is somewhat the charm of early Burton films, I think, that they’re very odd.

But still tonally it’s pretty queasy, there’s some odd mismatches in the tone of it. Like, is Betelgeuse meant to be just a zany villain or is he meant to be genuinely a figure of horror? It’s quite hard to tell. I guess I consider it kids horror because I probably watched it as a kid, or it was the kind of film I remember being around as a kid. Certainly Burton I associate with my younger teenage years and people liking Burton.

Ren: Yeah, I think I watched it as a teenager.

Adam: What are your childhood or teenage memories of Burton?

Ren: I think mostly me being contrary and not being into Burton because it seemed like there were lots of teenage goths who were really into it, and I was just going ‘I’m not like that’. Just being contrary really. I’m sure I did watch Beetlejuice and I did watch Nightmare Before Christmas, but I was not much of an enthusiast, I guess.

Adam: I really liked Nightmare Before Christmas as a little kid, but definitely pre-teenage. I remember going to a friend’s house who lived at the other end of the village, and he had it on video, and I really like it up to the Oogie-Boogie’s lair, I couldn’t cope with when Oogie-Boogie — who, for the minimal amount of listeners who haven’t seen Nightmare Before Christmas, is a kind of sackcloth ghoul. He’s quite a big figure, and he’s made up of bugs, basically. So he’s an assemblage of bugs with a cloth thrown over him and at the end of the film he’s unravelled.

Jack, or Sally gets ahold of his thread and unstitches him and he falls to pieces and goes ‘my bugs!’ and as he falls apart his voice splits into the increasingly high-pitched and diminishing voices of the assemblage of bugs, as they scatter. (Adam says the next bit in increasingly high pitch tones) ‘My bugs! My bugs! My bugs! My bugs!’. And I found that incredibly disturbing, and I still think it is pretty disturbing, because where is his consciousness situated?! I guess he’s just meant to be a hive mind or something.

Ren: It’s similar to in Coraline isn’t it, the man upstairs who’s made of rats.

Adam: Oh yes, the other Mr Bobinski. Coraline says ‘you don’t understand, you’re just a copy she made of the real Mr Bobinski’ and he says ‘Not even that, anymore’ and just falls apart into rats. So I wonder if that is more of a Henry Sellick thing than a Tim Burton thing maybe.

Ren: Shall I give a little summary of Beetlejuice?

Adam: Yeah, and I think it can be a little summary.

Ren: Okay. Adam and Barbara, are a young married couple who die at the beginning of the film, and find themselves as ghosts, confined to the boundaries of their house with only a ‘handbook for the recently deceased’ for guidance. When a new family moves in, and they find their home being transformed by the obnoxious Delia, they decide to get the Deetz’s out by any means possible. The bureaucracy of the afterlife is no help, and their attempts at haunting only succeed in getting the sympathetic interest of the teenage daughter, Lydia, and so they turn to a seedy-looking rouge ‘bio-exorcist’ called Betelgeuse, who claims he can get the new inhabitants out for good.

That’s my unspoilery summary.

Adam: I guess the spoiler is: And things go awry. 
 Ren: — and things go wrong, yes.

Adam: So, what did you like about Beetlejuice.

Ren: I enjoyed all the playing with scale, the Borrowers-type things. The character Adam has a scale model of the town that he keeps in the attic, and when they summon Betelgeuse the Maitlands have to go into it and dig him out of his grave. But they’re digging through the squares of plastic astroturf and cork and —

Adam: That was the best bit, absolutely.

Ren: It was actually really great, wasn’t it!

Adam: It was really satisfying, the layers of different textures.

Ren: The layers of plastic and cork and the base of the model.

Adam: (with great satisfaction) Mmm-hmmm.

Ren: Just digging into that, it was really good.

Adam: Yeah, yeah. That was great. That was definitely my favourite bit.

Ren: I’m glad you agree.

Adam: I was like, ’screw the rest of the spectacle, this is what I want’.

Ren: That was really good.

Adam: I’ve written: ‘Oooooh, they’re digging through the packing material’. I like the fact that neither of us have that much to say about Beetlejuice, but both of us consider that —

Ren: A highlight. Top-notch stuff there.

Adam: I’m glad we’re on the same wavelength because this is the kind of stuff I say to my students and they’re completely bewildered, like ‘what are you on about Adam?’

I quite liked some of the aesthetic, its got this sort of odd, I guess it’s meant to be ‘50s American tat, I guess. Which is similar to what Paranorman does, but I think I like it more than Paranorman because it looks even ropier. Paranorman’s pretty slick, but this looks run-down in a way that’s kind of nice, I guess.

Ren: I liked the very Svankmejer-esque bit where they stretch out their faces.

Adam: With the eyeball fun. The eyeballs on their fingers.

Ren: Yeah, they’re trying to look scary. It’s another one of their attempts to look scary, because they have several failed haunting attempts. And they just sort of stick their fingers into their faces and stretch them out and distort them, with their eyeballs on their fingers. And that seems to be something that people remember, because my brother and Maki both remembered that part particularly. I didn’t though.

Adam: I vaguely did. I remembered the stop-motion sandworms, that are kind of jerkily animated. And I’d seen Beetlejuice in the cinema, and they were pretty enjoyable on the big screen, because they look so DIY and home-brew, and there’s something fairly likeable about them being in a fairly mainstream film.

Ren: I wrote down that they looked like a slightly gory hand puppet. And also that there’s a definite resemblance to a monster that turns up in Vincent, the Tim Burton short from 1982. There’s definitely a continuing aesthetic of Burton monsters.

Adam: He definitely likes doing that. I don’t know if you remember the duck with the razor-sharp teeth, on wheels, in Nightmare Before Christmas? That crops up in his Hansel and Gretel adaptation, which was another early short he did, just after he was a student, for Disney. That’s what lures Hansel and Gretel into the woods.

So he definitely likes re-using his little art objects, basically, which is something he shares with Jan Svankmejer, (who’s a stop-motion animator we both really like), and if you watch enough of his stuff you see the same objects crop up again and again, given little cameos in his films. It’s part of their private universe, and it’s nice as a fan because it means that you have that shared language of objects on screen.

Ren: What would you say the scariest part of the film was?

Adam: Well, it’s odd because I think there quite a lot of problems from a screenplay perspective with the first half, at least. For one thing it really stretches out the idea that the ghosts aren’t able to scare off this new family, and I just think ‘why don’t they start throwing objects around?’. It wouldn’t be that hard, to do something scary, as a ghost, really.

Ren: Yeah, they did seem quite at a loss.

Adam: Maybe I’m more mean-spirited than those nice characters, I’m just like ‘yeah, I could scare off people if I had ghost powers, pretty quick!’. So the first half a lot of the humour comes through bathos, and undermining the horror. You have potentially shocking images that are then immediately undermined, with characters being very underwhelmed by them. And I guess that’s what Burton likes to do, situating horror as part of the everyday suburban world, and that the real horrors are adult complacency and responsibilities and the ghoulish horrors are treated in quite a down-to-earth, even banal kind of way. You definitely see that in Edward Scissorhands which followed a few years after this.

Ren: And Frankenweenie as well.

Adam: Which also has that kind of DIY home-brew thing going on. It starts with a film that the kid in the film has made, which seems very similar to the kind of films Burton made as a child. If you look at his Wikipedia, quite charmingly it lists the films he directed as a child as well, like ‘Attack of the 50ft celery monster’. Did you ever make films as a kid?

Ren: I had a friend who I sometimes made little films with. They weren’t really anything that fun —

Adam: — filing, mostly. Executive jobs. A few excel documents.

Ren: We did this kind of spoof version of Blue Peter, where she was always the presenters. And it was mostly an excuse for her to do a very bad Birmingham accent, because we did phone-ins and she liked to do a very bad Birmingham accent for people in the phone-ins.

Adam: What did you get to do?

Ren: I was kind of an extra. I got to wear various wigs.

Adam: Ah, that’s good. Most of the films I made when I was young were just, I was really fascinated by the elementals of stop-motion, that you could have something in front of the camera, turn it off and take it out of shot, and then turn the camera back on and it would look like it just disappeared. So a lot of the films I made as a kid are me going (squeaky child voice) ‘I’m the amazing magician, and I’m going to make this disappear’. I like to think I’m united in that with the early cinema pioneers. And I did a James Bond spoof as well called The Disappearing Bomb.

Ren: Yes, I’ve seen that!

Adam: Oh God, I’m awful! Don’t reveal that I force my friends and acquaintances to watch my childhood videos. Probably on a first date as well. I have to admit I did bring in some of my home videos to my students and ask if they could make a film out of them.

Sorry, let’s get off my narcissism.

Ren: I was asking you about scary things in Beetlejuice.

Adam: Oh, well. I mean, none of it is really scary. It’s just that Beetlejuice is really creepy and off-putting obviously. But I don’t know if that’s exactly scary. I mean, I’d be scared if I was near him in real life I guess.

Ren: He’s very lechy and horrible.

Adam: He does make your skin crawl, which I guess is what it’s going for.

Ren: I’m glad there wasn’t actually all that much of him in the film.

Adam: There’s isn’t and I mean, Michael Keaton gives a pretty committed zany performance, but I’m glad there was very little of Betelgeuse in Beetlejuice. In many ways the film shouldn’t really be named after him, to be honest. It should be called The Useless Ghosts. Or, The Ghosts Who Were Nice. I guess the only real horror for me was the horror of being deprived of the eternal peace of death. Basically. Like, I would be pretty put out if I thought I’d died and then, oh, ok, I have to stick around for hundreds of years in the house.

Ren: No, it’s only 125 years!

Adam: God… and then what? And then they have to go to a waiting room. I was just like, ‘let them die, please!’. I found it quite funny that, the ghosts are summoned near the end in a seance, and they start shrivelling up and becoming desiccated corpses and the idea is that they’re dying within their death, and I was like, ‘come on, give them a break’.

Ren: No, no, I think if that happens they go to the lost souls room.

Adam: Ohhh, good point. And that’s just like being conscious but floating in a void.

Ren: Yeah, drifting formless and empty in a void forever. And I think that’s whats going to happen to them if they keep being exorcised.

Adam: Where’s the void without consciousness?! Come on. It’s pretty much the only thing that keeps me going! At the end of it it’s just like a nice, long sleep and you don’t even have to get up in the morning, great.

Ren: I mean, there’s some real horror in the people who have to be the civil servants in the afterlife.

Adam: And I guess the idea is like real-life civil servants, they all seem quite jaded and bored with their jobs, right. I quite liked the costume of the guy who’d been run over, he was like Flat Stanley.

Ren: Ah, that was terrifying!

Adam: That was pretty gruesome.

Ren: It was very grisly, but good.

Adam: And I guess that’s it, like Burton is rarely actually scary because he’s quite gleeful about all the ghoulish horribleness, and it’s just revelling in ghoulishness and morbid unpleasantness.

Ren: It took me a while to notice that their case-worker in the afterlife, Juno, had her throat slit. It’s quite subtle.

Adam: I thought it was a tracheotomy, I thought the idea was she exhales her smoke through the hole. So I was assuming that the er, joke, if you will, was that she’d died of throat cancer from smoking, but she was still smoking even so in the afterlife. I might be wrong, but that’s what I —

Ren: Ha Ha Ha

Adam: Ha Ha Ha. It does have a few bits like that, where if you’re not sure if it’s going for a joke or not, and there are moments that are disquieting, maybe. But then it’s a 15 rated film, it’s not really a kids film. But then I can’t really imagine many proper adults going to the cinema to watch it. Did you have any thoughts about the tone of it? I mean, we can get into things that troubled us about the film.

Ren: I mean, it makes sense reading a bit about it and hearing that the original script was a lot darker and then it got lightened up, because it does seem like it could have been a lot darker but it’s deliberately keeping it quite light.

Adam: Yeah, because originally Betelgeuse has more predatory designs on Winona Ryder’s character, so in the film he does marry her, and that’s shown as troubling, but it’s presented as for expedient reasons; he just wants to do that so he can get some kind of death visa or something like that. Whereas his interests seem to be far more prurient and disturbing in the original screenplay. So I’m glad they got rid of that. And I think especially as for most teenagers, Winona Ryder’s character would be the obvious point of identification. She’s a goth, basically, is her character. But Tim Burton’s quite good at writing that kind of character. You get the sense that Burton knew what it was like, as a kid, not to fit in and to feel different from others, so that stuff in his films always feels fairly convincing to me.

Ren: And she’s quite like an older female version of Vincent, from the short. Vincent is a very short film, a poem, animation —

Adam: — a student film, I think.

Ren: He’s a boy who wants to be Vincent Price, and has various gothic affections and various adults in his life deflate that and say ‘you’re just a little boy’. And also in Beetlejuice, Barbara says to Winona Ryder’s character ‘you look like a regular girl to me’, after she’s gone on one of her morbid, gothic tangents.

Adam: Yeah, she writes, it’s suggested it’s a suicide note, or at least a dark poem. Winona Ryder has very scrabbly handwriting! I don’t know if she was directed to make her handwriting more goth, or if that was actually teenage Winona Ryder’s handwriting.

It was quite nice watching this just after watching Stranger Things, I guess, to see a young Winona Ryder. There’s something slightly cartoon-like about her. She’s got these very animated, darting eyes and she’s so little! I forgot how small she is. She did better work in Heathers and Edward Scissorhands, but I think as a teenage actor she’s very likeable.

So I’ve written as a note, ‘haunted by the absence of people of colour’. That’s my very academic, lit-theorist way of putting it, I guess. So originally Betelgeuse was meant to be played by Sammy Davis Jr, and I think coupled with the predatory aspect that was originally in the script, you do wonder if it’s exploiting these ‘80s fears rooted in Jim Crow laws, of the black male super-predator, basically. I’m very glad that’s written out of the script, but I think it’s faintly still there. I mean, we’re two white people so I can’t speak expertly about this, but it does feel like there’s lingering stuff there that is uncomfortable.

Ren: Yeah, there’s in the waiting room there’s a witch doctor character who shrinks peoples heads —

Adam: The famous scene is they all sing and dance to Harry Belafonte. I mean, I guess the root idea, not that this makes it defensible, I suppose thematically, the idea is that these are white suburban yuppies, and they’re obviously really inauthentic and tasteless, and maybe originally Betelgeuse is a site of racial anxiety, and then he’s changed in the revised script to being more about class anxiety. He’s the uncouth, southern hillbilly stereotype. So a lot of Burton’s films are about white suburbia and contamination fears, so you could, at a stretch, say it’s trying to be subversive. And it is faintly there, but not enough is done with it in any interrogative way, it’s just there and it’s uncomfortable.

Ren: I don’t think it really feels like it’s particularly being challenged in any very thorough way.

Adam: No, and it feels a bit odd to use… I mean Harry Belafonte’s music is fun, but to use it just as a source of fun it depoliticises Belafonte, who was a very politically radical figure, and using him in a mainstream Hollywood film just for a set piece. I don’t know. Eh. It might be that Burton has in more recent years been called out for the pervasive whiteness of his films.

Ren: I imagine so. This one is 1988 so it is a while ago now. I don’t know if he’s changed. I haven’t really watched many Burton films in recent years, to be honest.

Adam: It’ll be very interesting… I mean, I say interesting, for people who are less privileged it’s not going to be interesting, it’s going to be upsetting and infuriating potentially, to see what he does with Dumbo. Because he’s doing the live action remake of Dumbo, and obviously Dumbo has, as most early Disney films do, a lot of racist elements. So, um, he’s going to have to tread lightly, frankly. Hopefully he’ll be able to and create something good. We’ll see.

Ren: Do you want to talk about Frankenweenie a bit? I mostly want to talk about it because it has Shelley Duval in it.*

Adam: You just really love Shelley Duval!

Ren: Yeah, I do! I didn’t know she was in it, and then she turned up and I squealed with delight.

Adam: Did you literally squeal with delight?

Ren: I did. Most of my notes are just doodles of Shelley Duval’s face, some of them with hearts around them.

Adam: Oh, you’ll have to scan that, I want to see.

Ren: Lovely Shelley Duval.

Adam: Did you want to say any more on that, or was that -?*

Ren: I don’t know. Probably my Shining rant isn’t really relevant.

Adam: Not strictly.

Ren: Basically I hate The Shining because it’s really mean to Shelley Duval, and she looks really upset throughout the whole film.

Adam: And was, I think.

Ren: Yeah, and now we know also had a horrible time filming it. And I think that the way it’s filmed seems like it sides with the abuser, and it felt really horrible and wrong to me.

Adam: I think that’s a really fair critique of Kubrick. I do think, thematically, his stuff is about the allure of power, but you do feel like there’s a lot of giving the audience vicarious pleasure through occupying the perspective of abusive sadistic men. The same thing totally happens in Clockwork Orange, which I really dislike. I like bits of The Shining because it’s got some fun set pieces, and it’s got cool tracking shots. But Clockwork Orange I find totally intolerable, I really hate that film. Because it just feels really nasty. I think his films feel very anti-human to me, you could say that’s what he’s doing but…. I’ve known so many guys who say that Kubrick’s their favourite director, and it does trouble me a bit.

Ren: I wondered if, you know in Beetlejuice the Maitlands drown because they veer off the bridge because they’re trying not to hit a dog, and then they’re teetering on the edge of falling into the river, and the dog’s on the other end of the see-saw, and then casually hops off and they fall into the river and drown. I wondered if that was a sort of balancing as a dog gets killed in Frankenweenie.

Adam: So you think that the dog is taking revenge in a sense?

Ren: Yes. I mean not the same dog, but dogs.

Adam: So dogs were trying to right the filmic balance. But of course, as revenge often goes, it goes too far. The murder dog kills two humans, whereas only one dog… I mean, I guess you could say that Sparky in Frankenweenie is killed twice, in a sense. But how many people have to die to make up for All Good Dogs Go To Heaven. Actually I think it’s All Dogs Go To Heaven, I think I stipulated good dogs because I don’t really like dogs. I can recognise Frankenweenie’s quite a charming little film, but I don’t like dogs. God, I’ve just lost half our subscribers at this point. I like cats! You like the cats, internet people, right!

There are shrimp hands. Shrimp hands. That was good.

Ren: Yep, shrimp hands. Liked the shrimp hands.

Adam: And the dead teenage footballers were pretty cute. It had some ditzy footballers who don’t seem to understand they’re dead, and they randomly appear at the end to dance alongside Winona Ryder’s character for no reason whatsoever.

Ren: There was a really horrible spider at the beginning, it was much too big. Alec Baldwin picks it up in his hands and I was not happy about that.

Adam: He does say it’s big though, he says ‘Oh, you’re big’ or something, to it. Were you not happy about it from a worker’s rights perspective? Get the actor’s union involved in this.

Ren: I’m not happy that he had to pick up a spider with his bare hands that was that large. And apparently he’s very unhappy with his performance in this film. But maybe it’s because he’s so put off by having to touch such a horrible spider.

Adam: Yeah, maybe he just kept thinking about it.

Ren: You know the dog in Frankenweenie’s called Sparky. Is that where Dog Like Sparky comes from?

Adam: Hmmm. It’s a good question but I don’t think it is. I swear that I’ve read something else. I mean, we’re getting into obscure references again. We could put a link to Dog Like Sparky.

Ren: It’s a song by a band called The Cardiacs, that me and Adam are very keen on.

Adam: Yeah, they’re worthy of laudation.

Ren: They are worthy of laudation.

Adam: I don’t know if there’s so much more to say because Burton… I guess some of those later films teenagers would watch them, but they’re not quite within the remit of kids horror. Sleepy Hollow feels like it’s more geared towards adults, I’d say. Edward Scissorhands is… I wouldn’t be unhappy about children watching Edward Scissorhands, I suppose. The death of the main antagonist is surprisingly violent, I remember.

But I think on re-watching Beetlejuice I prefer Edward Scissorhands. Which is a bit more heartfelt and sweet and has a bit more of a plot. I like where just stuff happens, but Beetlejuice does feel a bit scattered to me, like really it’s the set design that’s holding it together.

Ren: I mean, it’s that digging scene with the astroturf and the cork. That’s the heart of the film.

Adam: I mean, to be honest that could be a short film, and I’d probably give it ten out of ten stars. It’s a hot take. I’ll make a Buzzfeed list, ‘The twenty-five reasons why the astroturf digging scene is the best sequence in ‘80s cinema. You’ll be shocked when you find out why’.

Ren: Just the textures.

Adam: The list would just be ‘textures, textures, textures’ in increasingly large fonts.

Ren: Good.

Adam: So, we’re back onto more regular kids horror fare with William Sleator.

Ren: My cover of Interstellar Pig has arrived, we’ll talk about the cover in the next episode, obviously. But it is wonderful.

Adam: Get ready, folks, because this is a largely forgotten book about an evil alien board game.

Ren: Yessss. Do you have a sign-off?

Adam: Just don’t be like Betelgeuse.

Ren: Yeah. Keep it spooky, but don’t be creepy.

Adam: Nice.

Ren: Alright, our intro music’s by Maki Yamazaki, our outro is by Joe Kelly, our artwork is by Letty Wilson. See you next time!

Adam: Bye!

(Outro music plays)

• I now realise that Adam probably meant, ‘do you have any more thoughts on the short film Frankenweenie’, not ‘do you have any more entirely unrelated commentary about Shelley Duval’ but here we are.

• I got so excited about Shelley Duval I failed to explain the plot of Frankenweenie. It’s a Frankenstein inspired story in which a boy brings his dog back to life after it gets hit by a car.