‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Venice premiere a giddy family reunion

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VENICE – Thirty-six years have passed since Tim Burton somehow turned “Beetlejuice,” a B-horror comedy starring Michael Keaton as a roguish demon in a striped suit, into one of the biggest box office successes of 1988. So, of course, one of the first questions at the news conference Tuesday for the world premiere of its sequel, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” was about how everyone felt about getting old.

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“Well, for me, there was no denying the aging. You’ve just got to embrace it and be happy to be alive,” said Catherine O’Hara, who’s reprising her role as step-matriarch Delia Deetz. “And it’s just so great to see Michael [Keaton]’s face up close again. … He hasn’t aged at all because he’s already dead.”

If you’ve ever had a nightmare featuring Keaton, or remember watching “Beetlejuice” so much you wore out your family’s VHS tape, congratulations! They’re old, we’re old. Or possibly dead. You know how it goes. For those who don’t, the original film saw a young couple (played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) die in a car accident and then relentlessly haunt the eccentric Deetz family (O’Hara, Jeffrey Duncan Jones and Winona Ryder), who move into their house and turn it into an avant-garde art project. At their wit’s end, they enlist the help of Beetlejuice, a “bio-exorcist” whose eyes often bug out of his head, to scare the Deetzes off, with disastrous results including but not limited to Beetlejuice tying to force Lydia (Ryder) – the only member of the family who can see dead people – to marry him so he can return to human form.

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For members of Gen X – and the families who raised them – Burton’s follow-up to “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” is in our cultural DNA. It was such a legendary hit in the heyday of home video that it was the first title mailed out by a burgeoning DVD delivery service called Netflix. And it’s impossible to overstate how much it shaped a generation’s ease in talking about death, desire to explore creepy Gothic houses and sense that Ryder is perhaps the coolest person who will ever exist on this planet.

For years, Burton said, he and the original cast have talked about making a sequel, but it wasn’t until the director met this generation’s coolest person, Jenna Ortega, and cast her as the star of his Netflix megahit “Wednesday” that he got “re-energized” about the idea. In the new movie, which opens in wide release Sept. 6, Lydia is a world-famous psychic medium and widow mom who returns to the original “ghost house” with her sullen teenage daughter Astrid, played by Ortega, after a family tragedy. It’s only a matter of time before the family attic comes into play and a certain demon appears.

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Ortega, a big fan of the film even though she was born in 2002, is essentially the new Ryder.

“For me, it was just making sure that I wasn’t ripping off lovely Winona’s work back in the day and making something new, but still pulling certain aspects and things like that that would make them similar,” Ortega said at the news conference. “Coming onto this, I think knowing that I was joining a team of giants and people who were so special and talented at what they do, I just kind of tried to mind my own business in the corner.”

She even looked like Gen Z’s answer to Ryder. Same hair, same witchy vibes, and wearing a burgundy suit jacket with dark lapels and shoulder pads that was a perfect ’80s throwback. The two seemed tight – like they could be related – and often looked at each other as they spoke.

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“[Astrid’s] very self-assured and opinionated and knows who they are, and I think [her] anger comes from a different place,” Ortega continued. Lydia was simply a goth teen who loved dark things, and Astrid, Ortega pointed out, is working through the loss of her dad and her mother’s preference for communing with the dead rather than the living. “I think Astrid has a bit more trauma and resentment towards the world, and that’s what she’s working through,” Ortega said.

In sensibility, though, Burton told Vanity Fair that he was essentially lightning-struck by both his queens-of-darkness muses. “They both, as young people, had a very strong soul,” he told the magazine. “They’re like silent movie actors.”

At the premiere Tuesday night, Ortega, now in a backless red gown, generated the kind of frenzy Ryder had in her “Heathers” and “Edward Scissorhands” heyday, with screaming Italian teens crammed against barricades holding “Wednesday” material for her to sign in one hand and tiny electrical fans to beat the oppressive Venice heat in the other.

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“The film feels new because we’re seeing it through [Astrid’s] eyes,” Burton said at the news conference. “She feels kind of like the anchor to me.”

Beyond Ortega, the film adds new characters, including Justin Theroux as Lydia’s producer and smarmy boyfriend, and Willem Dafoe as a deceased actor from a TV procedural now policing the gateway to the underworld.

Time has also forced some absences. There’s no Davis, presumably because ghosts can’t age. Gone, too, is Baldwin, who hasn’t exactly been in Hollywood’s favor of late. And then there’s Jones, who in 2003 got five years’ probation and had to register as a sex offender for allegedly soliciting sexually explicit images from a 14-year-old boy. (The new movie devises a clever workaround for his character.)

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For fans of the original, there are plenty of callbacks, from the goth fashions to the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased.” Burton stuck with using practical effects such as a ravenous sandworm that, as in the original, vaguely resembles a sock puppet. Many creatures that would have taken months to make with CGI were instead fashioned quickly with toys bought at a store, ripped up and then stitched back together with rods in them. A song-and-dance sequence to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park,” that, just like the lyrics, has icing flowing down a cake in the rain, was largely improvised, Burton said at the news conference.

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The director never even rewatched the original to prep for the sequel. Instead, he just tried to remember “the spirit” and his favorite elements. Beetlejuice is the only one who just keeps on Beetlejuicing.

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“I think that it’s obvious that my character has matured,” said Keaton, jokingly. “He’s as suave and sensitive as he was in the first – I think he’s even more so in this one, just his general caring nature in the sense of social mores and his political correctness.”

Whenever people ask Burton if Beetlejuice evolves in the new film, he said he laughs.

“The funny thing about ‘Beetlejuice,’ as much as I love it, I never quite understood why it was a success,” he said. For the new movie, he thought about how much his life – and the lives of the cast – had changed over the decades, and what that would be like for the characters. “It just became a very simple, emotional movie. It’s a weird family movie, and that’s what we are, a weird family.”

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He said it’s also been his salvation as a filmmaker. He had fallen down the rabbit hole of doing commercial work and had become unmoored, much as Lydia does in the film. “Over the past few years, I got a little bit disillusioned with the movie industry,” he said. “I just realized, you know, if I’m going to do anything again, I just want to do it from my heart. … I sort of lost myself, and so, for me, this movie was a re-energizing, kind of getting back to the thing I love doing the way I love doing it, with each other.”

In other words, it’s a lot like the lessons of the movie: reconnecting with people you love, and realizing that growing old doesn’t necessarily mean you have to grow up.

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