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An undead entity that looks grotesque and is dressed in an old fashioned style tuxedo stands next to a girl in a red wedding dress.

Posted on August 22, 2024

A Living Death?: Talking Beetlejuice (1988)

In today’s episode, it’s Tim Burton’s fever dream masterpiece Beetlejuice—a horror-comedy classic with shades of surrealism that’s as colorfully bizarre as its namesake character! The film follows Barbara and Adam Maitland, a recently deceased couple, intent on scaring off the new living occupants of their home, the Deetz family. When their best ghostly efforts prove futile, they decide to enlist the services of Betelgeuse, a freelance bio-exorcist more interested in causing havoc than in helping. With its long awaited sequel set to hit theaters September 6, we’re taking a look back at Burton’s first commercial success so stay tuned.

Recommended Reading:

Fowkes, Katherine A. “Tim Burton and the creative trickster: A case study of three films.” The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream. Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 231-244.

Middlemost, R. “”My whole life is a dark room”: Nostalgia and domesticity in Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands.” A Critical Companion to Tim Burton. Ed. A. Barkman & A. Sanna. Lexington Books, 2017, pp.207-220.

van Elferen, Isabella. “Dannv Elfman’s Musical Fantasyland. Or, Listening to a Snowglobe.” The Works of Tim Burton: Margins to Mainstream. Ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 231-244.

Posted on August 26, 2022

The Top 10 Horror Moments in the Batman Cinematic Universe

Guest Post

While director Matt Reeves may have described the most recent Batman movie, The Batman (2022), as “almost a horror film,” horror as an aesthetic mood or idiom pervades representations of the character and his world across cinematic history. The stylistically and tonally diverse cinematic projects of Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, and Christopher Nolan and now, Matt Reeves, have deployed some quintessential tropes of horror filmmaking in the course of envisioning the caped crusader and his adventures. Batman has served as a convenient and uniquely ingenious cultural device that allowed directors to crystallize the social and political horrors of their times on the cinematic scape. This list consists of the Top 10 Horror moments in the cinematic history of Batman. The scenes are ranked in order of least to most horrifying, with no. 10 being a semi-comical scene that draws on horror aesthetics, and no. 1 being an out-and-out jump-scare moment.

Posted on October 16, 2020

The Legends of Sleepy Hollow

Guest Post

When autumn rolls around horror movies awake. Among the most enduring of stories for fall frights is the short story by Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The story is simple: an outsider schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, comes to Sleepy Hollow and is smitten by Katrina Van Tassel. Katrina’s beau, Brom Bones, frightens the credulous schoolmaster out of town by masquerading as the headless horseman of local lore. This secular ghost story became a big screen hit with the addition of a religious element to the script. This addition fueled two seasons of Fox’s sleeper hit of 2013, Sleepy Hollow. It also may have contributed to the series’ demise. How did all of this come about?

Published two centuries ago in 1820, Irving’s story was the basis for one of the early ghost films of the cinematographic era—The Headless Horseman (1922), directed by Edward D. Venturini. While horror films have a longer pedigree than is generally acknowledged, this was clearly an early attempt to translate a ghost story to cellulite. Two other silent films addressed the topic as well, but they don’t survive in film. Read more

Posted on January 1, 2016

Beetlejuice and the Invisibility of Childfree Couples

Gwen

I’m going to be honest with you; I really just wanted to watch Beetlejuice (1988). What emerged was completely unintended. As horror reviewers and academics we tend to read into things for postmodern interpretations of the world around us. As horror fans, sometimes we just want to sit back and indulge in some of our favorite films. Unfortunately our brain doesn’t always get the message to just sit down and shut up. That is exactly what happened on the way to Winter River, Connecticut, when I tried to join the Maitlands for a lazy Sunday afternoon. For those of you nay-sayers, yes I know that Beetlejuice is characterized as Comedy Fantasy—but, it’s my party and I’ll review it if I want to.

While my brain was supposed to be turned off, I realized something about this movie: it is all about Lydia. The film reads like a foreign adoption story about a childfree couple wandering the earth until they are made into a real family via the addition of a child. What I found most interesting about Beetlejuice was the way that Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) Maitland are devalued and almost irrelevant to the outside world until they find Lydia. This is by no means a commentary on their relationship, as Tim Burton masterfully paints them as an ideal couple before and after their introduction to Lydia. It instead reflects on the way that the world around them emphasizes and validates couples with children.