If marriage is hell, then Tim Burton has a funny way of showing it in the beloved Beetlejuice movies. With the recent success of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, older and newer fans alike have responded well to the wacky horror-comedy sequel 36 years after the original Beetlejuice made the prospect of marriage a legitimate nightmare. Of course, the popular 2024 sequel also revolves around a garish wedding ceremony that features a showstopping musical number, connecting both films through Lydia (Winona Ryder) and Beetlejuice’s (Michael Keaton) macabre matrimony.
Yet, upon closer inspection, one could argue that the underlying theme in the Beetlejuice movies equates marriage with death, hell, reincarnation, and other nightmarish qualities that threaten to trap Lydia inside a purgatorial limbo forever. For Burton, Beetlejuice provides an artistic template to critique the horrors of marriage as a business contract devoid of true love, doing so in playfully subliminal ways that somehow remain tender and romantic.
Beetlejuice Lays the Groundwork
In Tim Burton’s original Beetlejuice, marriage is first depicted through Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis), a happy couple living a simple life in the small town of Winter River. Upon driving over a covered bridge, the couple’s car swerves out of a little dog’s way and fatally falls into the river below. When they return home, they slowly realize they are no longer alive, find the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, and enter a bizarre Netherworld afterlife between the living and dead.
When the Deetz family arrives from New York to buy the Maitland house, Adam and Barbara realize they can be seen by their Gothic daughter, Lydia Deetz. Lydia dislikes her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and begins bonding with Adam and Barbara, claiming she wants to be dead like them. Meanwhile, the “bio-exorcist” Beetlejuice lives inside a model of the town built by Adam and stored in the Matiland’s attic. Adam and Barbara summon Beetlejuice into the real world, and the demon convinces the couple that he can scare the Deetz family away and keep them from defiling their home and turning it into a haunted house tourist attraction.
After tormenting the Deetzs, Adam and Barbara work to eliminate the devilish miscreant. A seance is conducted to exorcise Beetlejuice, using Adam and Barbara’s wedding clothes to summon them back into the land of the living. Alas, as soon as Adam and Barbara appear, they rapidly age and their body parts begin to fall off. It’s a horrific display of purgatorial pain, forcing Lydia to act fast to save her ghostly friends. To do so, Lydia reluctantly agrees to marry Beetlejuice before a sinister minister, further underscoring Burton’s message about the cruel horrors of marriage.
The consequences of marrying Beetlejuice result in the demon wreaking havoc in the earthly realm with unchecked mischief. Fortunately, Lydia is saved in the nick of time by the Maitlands after they regenerate and Barbara attacks Beetlejuice with a Sandworm in the classic horror comedy. Not only is the prospect of marriage horrifying, but the wedding ceremony finds Lydia stripped of her voice when Beetlejuice shuts her mouth each time she tries to object to the marriage.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Amps Up the Anti-Marriage Themes
Marriage as hell is a thematic motif advanced in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. The most glaring personification of evil comes when Beetlejuice’s terrifying ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci) arrives, a soul-sucking succubus hell-bent on avenging her ex. Every time Delores is onscreen, she consumes the literal breath of each victim, leaving their corpse as a lifeless rubber doll on the floor. For Beetlejuice, each time he thinks or speaks of Delores, he expresses thoughts of pain and suffering, thereby equating marriage with death and destruction. Yet, as Delores pursues Beetlejuice, all Beetlejuice wants is to reunite with Lydia, the one who got away 36 years ago.
When Lydia is introduced, viewers learn her husband Richard (Santiago Cabrera) died in an accident in the Amazon. For Lydia, thoughts of marriage are also marred by tragedy and death. Lydia gets a second shot at marriage when her producer boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux) tastelessly proposes to her at Charles’ funeral. Lydia is reluctant to marry Rory because she doesn’t truly love him and Delia and her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) disapprove. Despite knowing that it’s the wrong thing to do, Lydia agrees to marry Rory two days later on Halloween.
The horrors of marriage reached a fever pitch during the Halloween wedding. Rory is given a truth serum and blurts out his true feelings for Lydia. He neither loves Lydia nor wants to marry her for genuine reasons. Instead, Rory wants to marry Lydia to control her “Ghost House” TV show and exploit her for monetary gain. Just as Lydia learns of Rory’s betrayal, Beetlejuice adorns himself and Lydia in wedding outfits and prepares to marry her.
The happy prospect of marrying Lydia quickly becomes a nightmare for Beetlejuice when Delores arrives at the church seeking revenge. Between Delores the evil ex, Rory the conniving backstabber, Lydia’s first marriage marred by death, and Beetlejuice seeking salvation, the movie highlights the horrors of marriage time and again.
In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Charles Deetz’s death plays a role in underscoring the marriage as hell theme. Delia explains that Charles died in a tragic plane crash that left his corpse headless in the rewatchable horror comedy. Charles wanders around the Netherworld with a bloody spinal cord, looking to reunite with his family. After being fatally bitten by twin asps, Delia reunites with Charles in the Netherworld, and the two board the Soul Train to The Great Beyond. While it’s great the two find each other, it took a grisly beheading and a senseless poisoning for them to do so.
The horrific fates recall Adam and Barbara rapidly aging and falling apart at the end of Beetlejuice, proving that the horrors of marriage extend beyond being wedded to Beetlejuice himself. Marrying Beetlejuice is a hellish prospect for Lydia, just as marrying Delores was a nightmare for Beetlejuice. But the afterlife doesn’t provide a happy marital ending for Adam and Barbara or Charles and Delia, long-married human couples whose lives were forever corrupted by Beetlejuice. The irony is that Beetlejuice believes marriage equals salvation when the reality is that marriage often equals a one-way ticket to, if not hell, a mortifying afterlife.
Beetlejuice is available to stream on AppleTV+ and Max.