Beetlejuice

Barbara and Adam Maitland were just about to spend their vacation at a dream location - their beautiful New England home. However they are killed in a car accident and are now trapped in their home for 125 years. Instead of living with the new inhabitants, they decide to enlist the help of a bio-exorcist to rid their house of unwanted occupants.

92 Minutes

Michael Keaton: Beetlejuice
Alec Baldwin: Adam Maitland
Geena Davis: Barbara Maitland
Jeffrey Jones: Charles Deetz
Catherine O'Hara: Delia Deetz
Winona Ryder: Lydia Deetz
Glenn Shadix: Otho
Sylvia Sydney: Juno
Annie McEnroe: Jane Butterfield
Robert Goulet: Maxie Dean
Maree Cheatham: Sarah Dean
Cynthia Daly: Receptionist
Dick Cavett: Bernard
Susan Kellerman: Grace
Maurice Page: Ernie
Simmy Bow: Janitor

"I didn't work for a long time between Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Beetlejuice because I just didn't want to do the things they were offering me. I was being offered any bad comedy. It was a case of, you do a bad comedy, you get offered all the bad comedies....It was David Geffen who asked me if I wanted to do Beetlejuice. I loved it because I had read a lot of scripts that were the classic Hollywood 'cookie-cutter' bad comedy. It was really depressing. Then this script came through the door, and after Hollywood hammering me with the concept of story structure, where the third act doesnt work, and it's got to end with a little comedy, or a little romance, the script for Beetlejuice was completely anti all that: it had no real story, it didn't make sense, it was more like stream of consciousness. That script was probably the most animorphous ever. It changed a lot, but the writer Michael McDowell had a good, perverse sense of humor and darkness, and that was the good thing about it. It had the kind of abstract imagery that I like, with these strange characters and images floating in and out."
Tim Burton, from Burton on Burton