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supernatural
1988 · PG · 1h 32m
In this house... if you've seen one ghost... you haven't seen them all.
Death comes with a waiting room, a caseworker, and a very unhelpful handbook.
After dying in a freak accident, Adam and Barbara Maitland find themselves trapped as ghosts in the New England farmhouse they loved in life — unable to leave and powerless to stop a fashionable New York family from redecorating everything they cherished. Desperate and out of their depth, they reluctantly summon Beetlejuice, a loud, crude, and wildly unreliable freelance "bio-exorcist" who promises to drive the living out. Tim Burton's darkly comic debut blends the mundane indignities of death with slapstick chaos and a surprisingly tender story about misfits finding connection.
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Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis) Maitland are a happily married couple in a quaint Connecticut farmhouse. They die in a car accident and wake up back home as ghosts — unable to leave without entering a void full of giant sandworms, and confronted with the afterlife's bureaucratic reality: a waiting room, a caseworker named Juno, and a Handbook for the Recently Deceased that's nearly impossible to decipher.
The Deetz family moves in: Charles (Jeffrey Jones), his conceptual artist wife Delia (Catherine O'Hara), and his goth teenage daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder). Lydia, unlike her parents, can see the Maitlands — and is oddly comfortable with them. Delia immediately begins gutting the farmhouse's cozy interior for modernist installations, which horrifies the ghosts.
Adam and Barbara's attempts to scare the family away are completely ineffective. Desperate, they summon Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) — a crude, chaotic freelance bio-exorcist from the afterlife's yellow pages. They say his name three times and immediately regret it: he's lewd, destructive, and impossible to control.
Betelgeuse's schemes escalate until he fixates on tricking Lydia into marrying him, which would grant him full freedom in the living world. In a climactic showdown, Lydia says his name three times in reverse and banishes him back to the waiting room. The Maitlands make peace with the Deetzes, Lydia learns she can fly, and the two families settle into an unlikely supernatural coexistence.
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