The Ghost With the Most

It's spooky season babes! Let's celebrate with a look back at the creepiest of creeps, the scabbiest of scabbies: Beetlejuice!

It’s officially spooky season and while Halloween is my favourite holiday of the year, I don’t really like scary movies! In fact, I haven’t been able to watch a really scary movie since my teens because they give me nightmares that can go on for months at a time. So to get me in the mood for the season of ghosts and ghouls, I usually find myself returning to spooky favourites from my childhood like Hocus Pocus, Ghostbusters, Death Becomes Her, Casper, The Addams Family and this week’s AutCast offering: Beetlejuice!

Welcome to AutCasts, a free bi-weeekly newsletter by writer, Aisling Walsh, exploring neurodivergence through cinema’s oddballs, misfits & rebels!

I haven’t got much to say about Tim Burton, his racism, bad takes on “cancel culture”, prolonged association with Johnny Depp, or the fact that he hasn’t made a decent film since Mars Attacks (fight me). Rather, this post is an homage to Lydia Deetz (and Winona Ryder) who was my teenage crush, idol and aspirational role model. Like so many other closeted teen queers, however, I mistook lust and adoration for simple admiration.

Beetlejuice is a 1988 horror-comedy directed by Tim Burton. When the Maitlands (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) decide to spend their vacation at home, they never imagined they would be trapped in their house for the next 125 years. The couple die when their car lunges off a local bridge, in the kind of accident you would expect they might survive. But they arrive home hours or days later, sopping wet, and realise they are, in fact, dead. As they begin to grapple with the afterlife, their beloved home is invaded by a family fleeing the New York hustle. Lydia’s father (Jeffrey Jones) is determined to have a life of rest and relaxation in the Connecticut countryside and his wife, Deelia (Catherine O’Hara), decides to renovate the Maitland’s house to make her forced relocation bearable. While Lydia makes contact and eventually becomes friends with the ghosts, the Maitlands plot to scare her family away. Their meek attempts at haunting fail and in desperation release the hyperactive, scab-ridden, bio-exorcist Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) into the wild.   

With her wide-eyed stare, pale complexion and slightly crooked teeth, Winona Ryder became an icon for every gothy, misfit, troubled, teenage girl of the late 80s and early 90s and it all started with Beetlejuice. Premiering in 1988, when Winona was just 17, Beetlejuice was her third movie and Tim Burton’s first feature film, but it would make them both stars.

I don’t actually remember the first time I saw Beetlejuice, but Burton’s gothy aesthetic became part of the ambience of my childhood, nourishing my pre-pubescent tendencies towards melancholy and despair. I would regularly catch bits and pieces of the movie on network television and finally saw the whole thing alone one night as I while I babysat the neighbours’ children. It creeped me out then and it creeps me out even more now. Bizarrely, for a movie that features a “whore house” and lecherous ghost who tries to marry a teenager, Beetlejuice is rated PG. Nevertheless, I was four when it came out in the cinema and it probably would have scarred me for life if I’d seen it then.

I myself am strange and unusual…

Lydia might be the prototype of a ‘Not Like the Other Girls’ girl, a manic-pixie-goth-girl spawned from Burton’s imagination, but I still love her. Between Beetlejuice, Heathers and Welcome Home Roxy Carmichael, Winona was my archetype for disaffected, maladjusted, and probably neurodivergent, teen girls. I was obsessed.

Lydia has a wardrobe I found enviable and a daring with her hair and make-up which became a disaster whenever I tried to replicate it. Inspired by this strange and unusual creature, I too wanted to paint my bedroom black (though I eventually settled for purple) dress all in black, practice photography with a vintage camera and make astute but cutting observations of the world around me (this usually got me sent to my bedroom).

Lydia is serious and morbid in a way only teenage girls of a certain disposition can aspire to, cultivating an air of tragedy despite her obvious privilege. She’s an anomaly in a family made up of an investor father who can’t quite shake the hustle, despite the country surrounds, and her elitist step-mother who wants to turn the Maitland’s cottage-core into a late 80s avant-garde horror show. You could write Lydia off as insufferable and pretentious but her teenage ennui, captured my own sense of disconnect and despair with the world around me like few other fictional characters. I was so uncomfortable in my own skin and with other people that the existence of characters like Lydia Deetz on screen, and the fact that they were celebrated, helped me feel a little less alone in my condition as school and village freak.

But beyond the aesthetic, Lydia sees things that other people don’t. She’s the first to spot the Maitland’s ghosts hiding in the attic and the first to make contact with them. She makes more progress with the Handbook for the Recently Deceased than the dead couple ever manage. Lydia is the only one to empathise with the Maitlands when everyone around her wants to turn their house into a Disneyland for the paranormal. Her ability to see through the veil between our world and the afterlife and the pretensions of her parents who never manage to leave the hustle behind, are what make Lydia, in my humble opinion, a neurodivergent icon.

Never trust the living…

Lydia is in good company among Burton’s oeuvre. Most of his films are canonically neurodivergent, centring on misfits and outcasts, freaks and weirdos, which is a big part of why I loved them so much growing up. This is hardly surprising given that Burton is most likely one of us, although we only have his ex-wife’s word to go on for the moment. Beetlejuice firmly establishes the Burton brand, one that was so successful he would recycle it over and over until it became a Hot-Topic cliché: the stop-motion sandworms, black and white stripes on everything, distorted passageways, obsessions with death and the afterlife and the trials and tribulations of pale, melancholy outcasts and misfits.

I still delight in Lydia’s existence, but watching Beetlejuice 35 years later I realised that the movie actually makes little sense. It’s also kind of disturbing, not least Betelguese’s infestation of green scabs and his intention to marry a ‘little girl. Everyone on screen is doing a terrific job, especially Catherine O’Hara with her epic lip-sync. And kudos to Michael Keaton who went from a scab-infested super-creep to Batman within the space of a year (only Tim burton could have thought that would work).

Betelguese, Betelguese, Betelg—

In the unending, nostalgia-fuelled, stream of reboots that nobody asked for, we have been promised Beetlejuice 2 for 2024, with Jenna Ortega claiming the starring role. This is the second time Ortega has played an 90s goth-girl icon, the other being my ultimate teen idol: Wednesday Addams. No shade to Ortega, who is, by all accounts, a fine actor, but I could hardly be more underwhelmed by the prospect of this sequel.

In Burton’s hands the Netflix adaptation, Wednesday, was a flat, weird crossover between Harry Potter and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina that bore little resemblance to Sonnenfeld’s picaresque classics from the 90s nor Charles Addams’ original cartoons. The Netflix aesthetic even managed to overshadow Burton’s own tired visual styling. Burton, in casting two Black actors as the principal bullies, has been rightly criticised for further evidence of anti-Blackness. The director is now infamous for creating universes populated almost exclusively by Vitamin-D-deprived, white people.

Rewatching Beetlejuice 35 years later feels like returning to a moment when the director still had something fresh and unusual to offer, when he was still using stop-motion and everything felt a little home-made and rough around the edges. Batman followed a year later and Burton had a 15 year streak hits. Somewhere between Planet of the Apes and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, however, he settled into an aesthetic which no longer challenges, nor rewards.

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I almost didn’t send this week’s newsletter because there is so much turmoil in the world that writing about movies, particularly one as ridiculous as Beetlejuice, seemed like a much too frivolous undertaking. But, I had a draft almost ready and writing feels better than spending the whole day crying. Still, it feels weird not to acknowledge what’s been happening in Israel and Palestine.

In a world saturated by misinformation, disinformation and hot-takes I found this essay by the EIC of Jewish Currents, Arielle Angel, to be a vital read:

"We need to imagine a movement for liberation better even than the Exodus—an exodus where neither people has to leave. Where people stay to pick up the pieces, rearranging themselves not just as Jews or Palestinians but as antifascists and workers and artists."

It’s hard to know what to do or who to support and as an ex-development worker I retain a healthy scepticism of the NGO world. Nevertheless, the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees UNRWA and Medicines San Frontiers are neutral entities working on the ground to save lives.

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In writerly news, I’m delighted to have a new piece up at Anomaly Press looking at autistic culture, comedy and the recent Hannah Gadsby “discourse”:

There is nothing novel in saying an Autistic person isn’t funny. We’ve been told we’re not funny, have no imagination, and lack both empathy and creativity for decades. But why should neurotypicals be the arbiters on how autistic people do comedy or how we get to tell or stories? You can read more here!

And I’m even more delighted to share that I was awarded a mentoring grant with the Arts and Disability Connect scheme to work with novelist Gavin McCrea on developing my novel: watch this space!

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Next week I’m taking a break from the spooky to indulge in a little personal nostalgia with a real movie, movie Casablanca!

In the meantime why don’t you tell me what your favourite scary (spooky) movie is?