Film

Beetlejuice

Name: Beetlejuice
Genre: Fantasy, Comedy
Released: 1988
Cast: Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, Winona Ryder, Catherine O'Hara, Jeffrey Jones

Tim Burton's gleeful haunted-house comedy, all handmade effects, black-and-white stripes, and Danny Elfman's carnival score. A dead couple hires a demon to scare the buyers out of their house, and the demon turns out to be the problem. Michael Keaton is a filthy, chaotic joy. For anyone who likes their afterlife bureaucratic and their comedy a little grimy and strange.

TMDb rating

7.4

If you liked this

Edward Scissorhands1990

Burton's tenderest and strangest film, a suburban gothic fairy tale about the freak who just wants to belong, carried by Johnny Depp's mute, scissor-handed performance and Elfman at his most gorgeous.

But It's sadder and slower than Beetlejuice, a melancholy fable rather than a laugh riot.

The Nightmare Before Christmas1993

The same joke about the afterlife-as-bureaucracy, rendered in gorgeous stop-motion, with Burton's fingerprints everywhere and a score that's basically pop-opera Halloween.

But It's a musical almost throughout, and if songs aren't your thing that's a genuine dealbreaker here.

Ghostbusters1984

The other great '80s haunted comedy, trading gothic dread for wisecracking slapstick and proton packs, with the same delight in making the supernatural bureaucratic and silly.

But Broader and jokier, with none of the visual strangeness — comedy first, horror-flavoured a distant second.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Topper1937

Beetlejuice's premise — dead people negotiating the rules of haunting, death as red tape rather than terror — is a direct descendant of this ghost-comedy, which invented the joke first.

A dizzy pre-war comedy where a dead couple haunts a stuffy banker to loosen him up, treating ghosts as a bureaucratic nuisance rather than a horror — decades before Beetlejuice made that its whole engine.

But Creaky black-and-white pacing and screwball mannerisms that feel a world away from modern comic rhythm.

The Addams Family1991

Same gleeful embrace of the macabre as domestic sitcom, with Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia making ghoulishness look like the height of romance and good manners.

But More arch one-liners than visual invention; it feels stagier and less handmade-weird than Burton's work.

Death Becomes Her1992

Another late-'80s-adjacent Hollywood satire drenched in practical-effects grotesquerie, this time aimed at vanity and immortality instead of suburbia and death.

But Meaner and glossier — less cozy-spooky, more vicious camp with a harder edge.

Gremlins1984

The same handmade creature-effects chaos and the same trick of hiding real menace inside comedy, plus a house getting joyfully demolished by things that shouldn't exist.

But Nastier violence played for laughs; some of it hasn't aged into the cuddly memory people have of it.

Big Fish2003

Burton in a gentler mode, swapping ghosts for tall tales, but with the same conviction that the strange and the sentimental aren't opposites.

But No comedy-horror engine at all here — it's a quiet, wistful father-son story, a big tonal shift.

Corpse Bride2005

Burton's other afterlife comedy, this time stop-motion, where the dead are livelier and more interesting than the living — Beetlejuice's joke, gently inverted.

But Slighter and more romantic than funny; it's a lovely mood piece rather than a riot.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice2024no page yet

Keaton back in the stripes decades later, Burton returning to the material with real affection rather than nostalgia-cashing, plus Winona Ryder aged right alongside her character.

But Sequels rarely recapture first-time chaos, and this one leans hard on callbacks you'll already recognise.

Delicatessen1991

Same appetite for the handmade grotesque and absurdist household horror-comedy as Beetlejuice, just filtered through French arthouse surrealism instead of Hollywood studio gloss.

A French surreal black comedy set in a grotesque, cluttered apartment building, built from the same handmade visual imagination — practical, ramshackle, faintly repulsive, and very funny.

But Subtitled and deeply strange, with almost no plot in the conventional sense — pure atmosphere and image.

Six Feet Under2001

Same idea of the dead as an unremarkable, recurring presence in domestic life, but stretched into a serious television drama instead of a manic 92-minute comedy.

A family funeral-home drama where the dead regularly appear and talk to the living, taking Beetlejuice's premise — death as ordinary, everyday business — and playing it devastatingly straight.

But It's a slow, serious, often heartbreaking character drama; there is no Keaton-style chaos to laugh at here.