Vote up the movie details that put the 'fun' in funeral.
Tim Burton's Beetlejuice proved there was laughter in the hereafter in the story about an undead couple who turn to an unruly bio-exorcist to remove unwanted house guests. Along the way, there are plenty of sight gags, undead civil servants, a Danny Elfman score, scary shrimp hands, a few Harry Belafonte jams, and classic '80s Winona Ryder. Throw in Michael Keaton's tour de force performance as the "Ghost with the Most," and a simple horror comedy is transformed into a cinema classic.
Over the years, fiendish fans of the film have been sharing small details, missed moments, and Easter eggs. Here are a few favorites.
In Beetlejuice, the waiting room has a sign that says "No Exit." No Exit is a 1944 existentialist play by Sartre about people in an afterlife waiting room.
During one sequence, Adam and Barbara Maitland enter the office of their afterlife caseworker Juno (Silvia Sidney), only to see her speaking to an entire team of deceased football players. If you look past Juno and through her office window, you can see several interesting things. Firstly, there appears to be a theater full of ghosts, which when watched in a traditional movie theater, creates the illusion that the real-life audience watching Beetlejuice is also being watched. Among the crowd, you can pick out a red and green skeleton who makes appearances in Burton's 1996 hit Mars Attacks!, as well as two men in very familiar suits and Ray-Ban style sunglasses. Fans of The Blues Brothers might know them as Jake and Elwood.
It comes from a very old expression that went somewhat like, “Married in red, better off dead,” due to the fact that: 1. He is dead and 2. She shouldn’t be marrying him for a multitude of reasons.
If y’all are curious, this is repeated in the musical too, probably to keep that scene similar (but the musical does a better job at this scene’s theme.)
In Beetlejuice, Otho mentions that if you commit suicide, you become a civil servant in the afterlife, which is what happened to Miss Argentina, the [clerk] in the waiting room.
In Beetlejuice (1988), Otho mentions during dinner that those who commit suicide become civil servants in the Netherworld. [In the film] The receptionist, Miss Argentina, refers to her “little accident,” wishing she knew what she knew now; Juno has a slit throat.
