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You know Beetlejuice. Beej. The Ghost With the Most. An enthusiastic watcher of The Exorcist. As portrayed by Michael Keaton in the 1988 Tim Burton comedy classic, Beetlejuice, as well as the upcoming sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, our favorite bioexorcist is a regular demonic trickster. He does some nasty things like trying to force teen Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder) to marry him. But his exploits rarely rise beyond pranks.
While that subtle distinction is probably what made the character a beloved household name—even winning him cartoon shows and Broadway musicals—that perception definitely wasn’t part of the original vision of the film. Before Burton joined the project, writers Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson wrote a story about a married couple who die after getting their dream house. When uncouth people purchase the home in their absence, the deceased newlyweds seek the help of a troueblemaker from the underworld.
All of that tracks with the movie we know. The first couple are Adam and Barbara Maitland, played in the film by Alec Baldwin and Gena Davis, the uncouth family are the Deetzes, namely stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), father Charles (Jeffrey Jones), and daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), and the troublemaker is Beetlejuice.
But as seen in a second draft of the script, titled Beetle Juice and credited to McDowell from a story by McDowell and Wilson, Beetlejuice began as a much more malevolent and violent film. And one scene alone could have taken what became a somewhat mischievous and offbeat family movie, and turned it into something truly evil.
The Romantic Stylings of Danny Death
Partway through this early draft of Beetle Juice, Lydia gets the thrill of a lifetime when her favorite singer Danny Death locks eyes with her from the stage. “Young soul, put off your flesh and come / With me into the quiet tomb,” the rock star croons. “He wants your body,” one of Lydia’s friends observes. And although she shushes him, the friend isn’t wrong. That’s because Danny Death is not, actually, Danny Death. It’s Beetlejuice in disguise.
Whereas the finalized version of Beetlejuice allowed Keaton to take on different personas and do comedy bits, Beetle Juice imagines its title character as a shapeshifter. In addition to Danny Death, Beetlejuice also takes on the form of an old woman to manipulate Delia, and as nerdy Irving Roger Smith (IRS) to toy with her husband Charles in the finished movie. To be sure, Beetlejuice uses these guises to wreak all sorts of havoc, but none worse than his treatment of Lydia as Danny Death. Lydia invites Danny to visit her home and meet her family. But because he has plans for them in his Old Woman and IRS personae, he stays focused on Lydia.
When she urges Danny to come meet her parents, he sneers, “There’s plenty of time for that
later.” According to the script, Danny then “pulls LYDIA into her own bedroom and slams the door.” Behind closed doors, Beetle Danny attacks her right away. “BEETLE JUICE / DANNY DEATH leans over and gives her a kiss on her neck,” the script reads. “At the same time, he’s pushing her down against her desk.” Lydia slides out of his grasp and tries again to convince Danny to come downstairs, but he still refuses.
“I have a little friend I want you to meet first,” he insists, unbuttoning his coat. Lydia reacts with shock, but it’s even worse than she thought. The little friend is “very much [a] deformed version
of BEETLE JUICE / DANNY DEATH himself, attached at the trunk to Danny’s chest.” The script further explains, “This parasitic monstrosity flops backwards, and hanging upside down, leers and grabs for LYDIA.”
You read that right. Instead of trying to marry Lydia, this early version of Beetlejuice goes straight to sexual assault, with the apparent goal of the ghost being to rape her.
The Ghost With the Most Carnage
Although the most extreme example, the assault scene highlights the tonal differences between Beetle Juice and Beetlejuice. As originally conceived and written, Beetle Juice is a hateful figure, one who threatens everyone, including Lydia’s sister Cathy—a sweeter character who also befriends the Maitlands in this version. “He’s going to destroy this house and kill everybody’s who in it,” Cathy tells her parents at the climax, urging Delia to fight back.
Indeed, Beetle Juice attacks Cathy at night, leaving her “torn and bloody.” When he makes the Deetz’s party guests dance, it’s not the delightful calypso seen in the finished film. Instead the script describes “spasmodic, frantic dancing” that culminates with “physical insanity,” with the dancers “crashing off one another, smashing against the walls, some of them flying up to the ceiling and hitting their heads, nose-diving along the carpets.”
And it’s not just Beetle Juice who has this darker edge. The Beetle Juice script takes its time wallowing in the Maitlands’ death at the beginning of the movie, filling it with nasty details. As in the finished film, Adam and Barbara drown after taking evasive action to avoid hitting a dog on a bridge. But the script adds more chaos in the form of a van full of hunters that slams into the Maitlands when they hit the brakes in front of the dog.
“A piling has smashed through the window on the passenger side, crushing the upper part of BARBARA’s arm. She is wailing in pain and fright.” Adam tries frantically to save her, but the script describes his attempts as both frantic and fruitless. We see the Maitlands drowning inside their car, watching the couple try to free themselves. “For a moment we hear their screams,” the script concludes; “then as the car fills up with water, the screams are cut off.”
Humor in the Horror
Nasty as the Maitlands’ death is, the Beetle Juice script does end with the dog Rocket walking away, unaware of the chaos he just caused. A variation of that gag appears in Burton’s movie, and that’s just one of the many gags in the script. Beetle Juice is often reaching for the funny, and its main character is manic. Ortho and Delia are tacky, Charles is exhausted, and Lydia is cool, even if her nicer side is relegated to Cathy.
In short, it’s easy to see why the script attracted Burton, who was coming off of his surprise hit Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. But when he came onto the project, Burton’s love of all things strange and unusual took over. The nastiness fell away, replaced by campiness. Beetlejuice is still a chaotic demon, but he occupies a space somewhere between scary and hilarious, just like the film.
We’ll never know if Beetle Juice would have been better than Beetlejuice. But given the excitement building around Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it’s clear that Burton’s take worked.
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