Screams from a Marriage

‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”

- JUSTIN CHANG

Michael Keaton stars in Tim Burton's sequel to his 1988 comedy, "Beetlejuice."

Tim Burton's "Beetlejuice" (1988) derived its title, by way of a phonetically useful misspelling, from the name of Betelgeuse, a centuries-old demon who delighted in pranking the living and the dead alike. Played by a marvellously repugnant Michael Keaton, with a bar smeared face, a sex pest's leer, a charlatan's patter, and a voice of boozy gravel,

Betelgeuse was a figure of malevolent play a puckish parasite of the afterlife.

Dare to summon him, by saying his name three times in quick succession, and you were in for a hell of a headache. But you were also in for some fabulously macabre spectacle, realized with special effects that, seen today, are all the more captivating for their old-fashioned, handcrafted inventiveness.

At Burton and Betelgeuse's command, inanimate objects sprang to vicious life, staircase bannisters coiling into lethal serpents, and a jauntily stylized blue-green underworldfull of shrunken heads, plucked eyeballs, and other grisly evidence of violent death beckoned to us from beyond.

If Betelgeuse was the movie's not-sosecret weapon, he was also something oftain ends, ultimately offered its sufferers no more relief or resolution than life. At its heart, and in its playfully jaundiced soul, "Beetlejuice" was also a movie about the burdens and blessings of familyand, specifically, about the comedy, horror, and surprising resilience of marriage.