Beetlejuice (1988)

directed by Tim Burton

Frances Klein

Twenty students slouched into the summer-school classroom, hoods up, rubbing barely-open eyes. One, Marlie*, was barely four feet tall, and had just turned 12. Thomas, already 18, had a straggly, mossy beard that he ran his fingers through compulsively. Between them were kids from Adak and Anchorage, white kids and Alaska Native kids and Filipino kids, preteens and teens. Each morning they were brought to the classroom from the group home where they had been sentenced to live for at least six months. It’s what their parents or probation officers or social workers chose instead of juvie, in the hopes that they would come out on the other side of treatment free of their addictions, traumas, and behavioral struggles.

As Education Director, my responsibilities included implementing the summer school curriculum. In theory, this helped our high school students recover needed credits. In reality, it got the kids the hell out of the residences for six hours of the day and gave them something to focus on other than antagonizing each other.

I chose Film Studies as one of the credit recovery options for summer school in the hopes that students would complain less about a writing intensive class if they got to watch movies. The syllabus I wrote was composed entirely of blockbuster movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s, films that have become so popular over time that they are embedded in our cultural lexicon. My students, with few exceptions, were coming from households where their parents didn’t take the time to make sure they attended school, much less show them their favorite old movies. My admittedly lofty goal was to give these students an entry point into a larger cultural conversation, and perhaps get them a little closer to graduating in the process.

The students were quick to share their judgments on each film as we progressed through the syllabus, and the reviews were mostly positive. Back to the Future was “messed up in a funny way,” and although Star Wars IV: A New Hope was “not as good as the new ones,” they admitted that “it would have been cool to see when it came out.” Jurassic Park had them rapt, on the edge of their seats, heckling Dr. Grant and his crew with calls of, “Don’t go in there, are you dumb?” and “I could NEVER, take your check back, I’m out.”

As the summer went on, the students tried to exert their influence on the syllabus, asking for movies to be dropped or added. But I had strong opinions about what was “worth” watching, and I was resistant to making changes. Eventually, their petitioning began to focus into a single, targeted request: they wanted a horror movie. 

“We should watch Insidious,” Maylynn suggested, to general approval from her peers.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “I have enough free-floating anxiety, I don’t need extra.” 

“Ooh, how about The Purge,” Rowan said, “that one has good stuff to write about.”

“Yeah, like character development,” Thomas pitched in. If nothing else, these kids knew how to appeal to me.

“Good try, but we can’t watch anything rated R, program rules,” I said.

“IT is based on a book, right?” Tanya asked. “That would be perfect for an English class.” 

And so it went. Eventually, their persistence wore me down, and I decided to throw in a horror-adjacent movie to get them to stop nagging. I could quote any number of pedagogical theories to justify this—student driven curriculum! Teacher-learner partnerships!—but in reality, I just wanted the argument to be over. There was also the element, as much as I hated to admit it, of giving the students reasons to stay in the program. Our facility was not locked, and students could run away for a few hours or days of freedom (and the drugs and alcohol that came with). Students had expressed regret about missing certain movies while they were on the run, and I started to let them know what movies were coming up as one more small motive to stay.

Beetlejuice was suggested by several coworkers. Although I hadn’t seen the movie myself, it seemed to fit the cult classic, embedded-in-American-culture theme of the rest of the syllabus. Like everyone else growing up in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, I went to school in a sea of Hot Topic merchandise, so I was familiar with Michael Keaton’s gravely voice and antics. A cursory watch at home confirmed that the movie should work. It wouldn’t be too scary for my youngest students, but would hopefully satisfy the horror movie demands of the class.

On the day of, only one student—Landon, a bespectacled boy from a village on the Arctic coast who had been pushing for us to watch 30 Days of Night—tried to complain that Beetlejuice was not “a real horror movie.” The other students quickly quashed his complaints when I said we could return to the original syllabus.

“It’s fine,” Gina said hastily, “I’ve heard it’s spooky.”

But it wasn’t fine. In the first five minutes, Kayleigh set the tone: Beetlejuice was a “corn field.” With flawlessly applied fake eyelashes and at least six B&E’s (that the cops know about), Kayleigh was the class cool girl. Her classmates chimed in to identify everything they found “corny.” Geena Davis’s long prairie dress. Winona Ryder’s choppy bangs. The exaggerated facial expressions of the cast. At the film’s conclusion, when Winona Ryder floats into the air to do an exaggerated lip-sync to Harry Belafonte’s “Hey Senora,” I knew that I would need to put extra work into making sure the post-film discussion wasn’t just a series of complaints.

I opened the discussion by asking for positives about the movie. If we could establish a shared appreciation for something in the film, I thought, maybe I could save myself from demands for “scarier” movies.

After a long moment of quiet, Tanya volunteered that “the mom” (Catherine O’Hara) “was pretty good.” Other students eventually articulated that they believed O’Hara was well cast, and that her scenes were the most fun.

After this meager concession came a long silence. One boy started idly kicking the back of another boy’s chair. To stave off the misbehaviors that come with boredom, I opened the floor to negatives. There was an initial chaos of overlapping insults:

“They didn’t even—”

“Them gross-ass faces—

“Why the hell were they all—”

When a speaking order was restored, they were quick to point out that many of the more ghostly scenes in the film felt as though they dragged on, including the famous “Day-O” scene, which one student described as “endless” and “trying too hard to be funny.”

Another complaint focused on the movie’s gross-out visuals, including the scenes where the Maitlands manipulate their faces into grotesque shapes. I pointed out that this element is common in other Tim Burton movies.

“It would be different if it happened a lot,” Thomas said, “but because it’s just a few random times during the movie it’s more out of place.”

The students extended this distaste to Beetlejuice himself, whom the girls declared a “major creeper.” They were especially against the subplot where he tries to marry teenage Winona Ryder.

“But doesn’t this make him an effective villain?” I asked. “If you find him creepy and think he’s dangerous, isn’t the character working as intended?”

The students were quiet. Then Kayleigh says: “Except…he doesn’t feel like a whole guy? Like, he’s not…” she looked around at her classmates for help.

“You know how sometimes they show a movie to a few people to see what they think?” Deon asked.

“A test screening, yeah,” I said.

“Yeah, that. It feels like they did that, and the people said the movie wasn’t scary enough or something, so they went back and added Beetlejuice to make it scarier.” Deon’s comments were met with a chorus of agreement. And he had, in fact, vocalized something I had been struggling with myself. While I appreciate Keaton, I don't understand why Beetlejuice is there. He seems secondary to the main plot in a way that makes him feel like he was either, as Deon suggests, added late in the development process, or like there are a significant number of his scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor.

And this was the crux of my students’ complaints. Beetlejuice as a film feels incomplete. All of the students agreed: the film is missing something.

At the end of discussion, we added Beetlejuice to our rankings of films we have viewed so far. Normally, this process elicited discussion as students debated where the new film should be placed. This time, Thomas marched to the board and wrote “Beetlejuice, 1988” in his spidery script at the very bottom of the list. There was no argument.

By the end of the summer session, Beetlejuice still hadn’t budged from its spot. In every discussion, minor complaints were qualified with “but at least it wasn’t as bad as Beetlejuice.” When the students sat down to their final assignment, an essay in which they reviewed one of the movies we watched that summer, half of the students picked Beetlejuice. One review encouraged Tim Burton to consider other career options. Another described how the movie would be improved by removing Beetlejuice altogether. Collectively, the reviews featured an impressive range of synonyms for the word “bad.”

The summer session was a wild success. The students, without exception, all recovered their credit. For some, it would mean the difference between finishing high school or not. After a year in this job, I knew that for those who fall off the academic track, the only graduation they’re likely to have is from juvenile to adult detention. As for my loftier goals, my dreams of giving the students an entry point into the cultural conversation? This was harder to gauge, but when we watched Black Panther on a rainy Friday afternoon early in the school year, several of the students caught the Back to the Future reference, and that’s not nothing.

* Student names have been changed for privacy purposes.

Frances Klein is an Alaskan poet and teacher. Klein is the author of (Text) Messages from The Angel Gabriel (Gnashing Teeth Press, 2024) and Another Life (Riot in Your Throat, 2025). Klein’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Microfictions, The London Magazine, Rattle, The Harvard Advocate, HAD, and others.