Beetlejuice

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.