In Winter River, Connecticut, Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) are spending their vacation decorating their big country home. Their real estate agent, Jane Butterfield (Anne McEnroe), is pestering them to sell. Adam spends a lot of time in the attic building a diorama of the town. They ran a hardware store, which is closed for now, and they drive in to get some items they need. On the way home, they swerve to avoid hitting a dog and drive off the bridge into the river.
They find themselves at home and can’t remember how they got there. When Adam tries to leave the house, he finds himself in a desert landscape and is driven back by an enormous sandworm. This has taken a few seconds, but Barbara claims he was gone for two hours. They find a book named Handbook for the Recently Deceased, notice that they have no reflection in a mirror, and realize they are ghosts.
The house is sold to a New York estate developer named Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) and his wife Delia (Catherine O’Hara), a talentless sculptor. Their Goth daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder) dislikes the house. In fact, she dislikes everything. With her interior designer, Otho, (Glenn Shadix), Delia begins to renovate the charming old house, turning it into a postmodern monstrosity. In the handbook, the ghost couple see a TV advertising concerning the bio-exorcism service of a black-eyed, green-haired character named Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton).
They travel to an otherworldly bureaucratic waiting room filled with impatiently waiting, and often severely injured, ghosts. When they return home, it is three months later and the house is totally redesigned. Their otherworld caseworker, Juno (Sylvia Sidney), tells them they must remain haunting the house for 125 years before they can move on. She warns them not to get involved with Beetlejuice, but to scare the Deetzes out of the house.
This is difficult because they are invisible, but Lydia can see them. Desperate, they summon Beetlejuice and are transported into the diorama to meet him. He is cruel and morbid and downright disgusting, and they escape to try to haunt the Deetzes. During a dinner party, they possess Charles, Delia, Otho, and their guests. Unfortunately, the experience delights their victims and they turn the house into a supernatural theme park. Otho discovers their ghost handbook.
They turn to Beetlejuice, who transforms into a giant snake and terrifies the Deetzes. Juno summons them to the afterlife and lectures them about Beetlejuice. Lydia is depressed and writes a suicide note. She discovers Beetlejuice and nearly summons him. Maxie Dean (Robert Goulet) and his wife Sarah (Maree Cheatham) arrive to see the ghostly manifestations, but the Maitlands refuse to cooperate. Otho uses the handbook and tries a séance, but they decompose and are exorcised to the realm of the dead.
Desperate to save them, Lydia pleads with Beetlejuice, who will save them if Lydia agrees to marry him, which will give him the right to stay in the living world. She speaks his name three times. He saves the Maitlands, drives away the nuisances, and prepares to marry Lydia. The Maitlands, recovering from the exorcism, try to banish him, but he banishes Adam to the diorama and Barbara to the desert world, which we know now is Saturn’s moon Titan. Just before the wedding ceremony ends, Barbara smashes through the ceiling on the back of a giant sandworm, who devours Beetlejuice. The Deetzes and the Maitlands agree to share the house. In the afterworld waiting room, Beetlejuice tries to steal a witch-doctor’s ticket and has his head shrunk in retaliation.
The film was directed by Tim Burton, with music by Danny Elfman, from a story by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson. Burton was also working on Batman with Sam Hamm. Before Burton got hold of it, the script was darker and less bizarre. Beetlejuice was originally a winged demon. Not surprisingly, Universal Studios thought Burton’s script was weird and horrible, so it was sold to the Geffen Company. Beetlejuice was changed many times and finally jelled when Keaton was chosen to direct. Gradually, the movie came to resemble the B-movies Burton grew up with as a child. It was met with a positive response from audiences, praised as brilliantly bizarre, manic, creepy, and funny. It is now considered a comedy classic or a creative mess. It received an Oscar and a British Academy Award for makeup, was awarded Best Horror Film at the Saturn Awards, among five other nominations, and it was nominated for a Hugo. It is called a Gothic dark fantasy comedy horror movie.