Plot
Barbara and Adam Maitland decide to spend their vacation decorating their idyllic New England country home. While the young couple are driving back from town, Barbara swerves to avoid a dog wandering the roadway and crashes through a covered bridge, plunging into the river below. They return home and, based on such subtle clues as their lack of reflection in the mirror and their discovery of a Handbook for the Recently Deceased, begin to suspect they might be dead. Adam attempts to leave the house to retrace his steps but finds himself in a strange, otherworldly dimension referred to as "Saturn", covered in sand and populated by enormous sandworms.
After fleeing back into their home, the Maitlands' peace is soon disrupted when their house is sold and obnoxious new residents, the Deetzes, arrive from New York City. The new family consists of Charles, a former real estate developer; his second wife Delia, an aspiring sculptor; and his goth daughter Lydia from his first marriage. Under the guidance of interior designer Otho, the Deetzes transform the house into a gaudy piece of pastel-toned modern art. The Maitlands seek help from their afterlife case worker, Juno, who informs them that they must remain in the house for 125 years. If they want the Deetzes out of the house, it is up to them to scare them away. The Maitlands' attempts at scaring the family away prove utterly ineffective.
Although the Maitlands remain invisible to Charles and Delia, their daughter Lydia can see the ghost couple and befriends them. Against Juno's advice, the Maitlands contact the miscreant Betelgeuse, a.k.a. "Beetlejuice", a freelance "bio-exorcist" ghost, to scare away the Deetzes. However, Betelgeuse quickly offends the Maitlands with his crude and morbid demeanor, and they reconsider hiring him, though too late to stop him from wreaking havoc on the Deetzes. The small town's charm and the supernatural events inspire Charles to pitch his boss Maxie Dean on transforming the town into a tourist hot spot, but Maxie wants proof of the ghosts. Using the Handbook for the Recently Deceased, Otho conducts a séance and summons Adam and Barbara, but they begin to decay, Otho having unwittingly performed an exorcism. Horrified, Lydia summons Betelgeuse and agrees to marry him if he saves them. Betelgeuse disposes of Maxie, his wife, and Otho, then prepares a wedding before a ghastly minister. The Maitlands intervene before the ceremony is completed, Barbara riding the Saturn sandworm through the house to devour Betelgeuse.
In the film's conclusion, the Deetzes and Maitlands live in harmony in the house. Betelgeuse, meanwhile, is seen waiting in the afterlife reception waiting room, where he angers a witch doctor, who shrinks his head.
Read more about this topic: Beetlejuice
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)