Beetlejuice (1988): 26 Shocking Things You Didn't Know

Beetlejuice (1988) is one of the strangest films a major studio ever gambled on: a ghost comedy whose title character is barely in it, led by a star who kept trying to turn the role down, made by a director almost nobody had heard of. Almost nothing about it went to plan. This video digs into how a project that began as a grim horror script, complete with a winged demon and drawn-out deaths, was rewritten into the playful classic we know. There's how Michael Keaton built the entire look and voice of the character himself from a few cryptic notes, why he is on screen for only about seventeen minutes, and how Tim Burton's first choice for the part was Sammy Davis Jr. There's the haunted house that was only a hollow facade in a tiny Vermont town, the dinner-party scene Burton was certain would flop, the executive who warned a writer the film would ruin his career, and the title the studio nearly swapped for something far worse. Along the way: the Oscar-winning makeup, the cameos most people miss, the discarded endings, the dying star the name was borrowed from, and the score Danny Elfman scrapped and started over.