“Beetlejuice” premieres in Venice, a joyful family reunion

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VENICE — Thirty-six years ago, Tim Burton somehow turned “Beetlejuice” into one of the biggest movies of 1988. So at a press conference on Tuesday for the world premiere of its sequel, “Beetlejuice,” the B-grade horror comedy starring Michael Keaton as a swashbuckling demon in a pinstriped suit, the first question asked was how people felt about getting older.

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“Well, for me, aging is undeniable. You just have to accept it and be happy to be alive,” said Catherine O’Hara, who reprises her role as stepmother Delia Deeds. “It was so nice to see Michael’s (Keaton) face up close again. … He hasn’t aged at all, because he’s dead.”

If you’ve ever had a nightmare featuring Keaton, or remember wearing out your family’s VHS tapes from watching Beetlejuice, congratulations! They’re old, and so are we. Or maybe dead. You know how it goes. For those who don’t know, the original film follows a young couple (played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) who die in a car crash and then relentlessly haunt the eccentric Deetzes (O’Hara, Jeffrey Duncan Jones, and Winona Ryder), who move into their house and turn it into an avant-garde art project. At their wits’ end, they enlist the help of Beetlejuice, a “bio-exorcist” whose eyes regularly bulge out of his head in order to scare the Deetzes away, leading to disastrous consequences, including but not limited to Beetlejuice’s attempt 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 Generation X and the families who raised them, Burton’s sequel to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is woven into our cultural DNA. A legendary hit in the heyday of home video, it was the first film to be mailed through the fledgling DVD delivery service Netflix. It’s hard to overstate how profoundly it influenced this generation’s lighthearted attitude toward talking about death, its desire to explore spooky gothic houses, and its sense that Ryder might just be the coolest guy on the planet.

Burton said he and the original cast had discussed a sequel for years, but it wasn’t until the director met one of the coolest people of this generation, Jenna Ortega, and cast her in the hit Netflix series Wednesday that he “rekindled his passion” for the idea. The new film, which hits theaters Sept. 6, follows Lydia, a world-renowned psychic and widowed mother who returns to the original haunted house with her sullen teenage daughter Astrid, played by Ortega, after a family tragedy. It’s only a matter of time before something evil pops up in the family attic and something demonic appears.

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Although Ortega was born in 2002, she is still a loyal fan of the movie. She can be said to be the new generation of Ryder.

“For me, I just wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to copy what Winona did back in the day and create something new but still keep certain aspects and things like that to make it similar,” Ortega said in a news release. “When it comes to that, I think, I know that I’m joining a team of giants and people who are very special and talented in their field, and I’m just trying to mind my own business in my corner.”

She even looks like the Ryder of Generation Z. Same hair, same witchy vibe, and a burgundy blazer with dark lapels and shoulder pads that perfectly recreates the 80s. The two seem close — like they could be relatives — and often look at each other while talking.

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“(Astrid) is very confident and opinionated and knows who they are, and I think (her) anger comes from a different place,” Ortega continued. Lydia is just a goth teen who likes dark things, while Ortega noted that Astrid is struggling to overcome the loss of her father and the fact that her mother prefers to communicate with the dead rather than the living. “I think Astrid has more trauma and resentment towards the world, and that’s what she’s trying to overcome,” Ortega said.

However, Burton told Vanity Fair that he was actually deeply moved by the two dark queens. “They were both very strong souls when they were young,” he told the magazine. “They were like actors in silent films.”

At Tuesday night’s premiere, Ortega, in a backless red gown, sparked the same frenzy that Red did in her “Heathers” and “Edward Scissorhands” heydays, as screaming Italian teenagers crowded barricades, clutching “Wednesday” material in one hand for her to sign and holding small electric fans in the other to beat the stifling Venice heat.

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“The film feels new and fresh because we’re seeing it through Astrid’s eyes,” Burton said in a press release. “She’s like the anchor for me.”

In addition to Ortega, the film adds a few new characters, including Justin Theroux as Lydia’s producer and unctuous boyfriend and Willem Dafoe as a deceased actor who once starred in a TV series and now oversees a gateway to the underworld.

Time has forced some of the cast to miss the show, too. Davis is absent, presumably because ghosts don’t age. So is Baldwin, who has been out of favor in Hollywood lately. And Jones, who was sentenced to five years’ probation and registered as a sex offender in 2003 for allegedly soliciting pornographic images from a 14-year-old boy. (The new movie devises a clever workaround for his role.)

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For fans of the original, there are plenty of similar elements to the film, from the Gothic fashions to the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased.” Burton stuck with practical effects, like the voracious sandworms, which, like in the original, act a bit like sock puppets. Many of the creatures that would have taken months to create with CGI were instead quickly created from store-bought toys, shredded and sewn together on sticks. The song-and-dance sequence to Donna Summer’s “MacArthur Park,” where frosting runs off a cake in the rain, as in the lyrics, was mostly improvised, Burton said in a press release.

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The director never even revisited the original to prepare for the sequel. Instead, he just tried to remember the “spirit” and his favorite elements. Beetlejuice is the only one that continues to use Beetlejuicing.

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“I think it’s clear that my character has matured,” Keaton joked. “He’s just as suave and sensitive as he was in the first movie — I think he’s even more so in this one, and he cares about other people in general, in terms of social conventions and political correctness.”

Whenever people ask Burton if Beetlejuice will evolve in the new film, he laughs.

“The interesting thing about Beetlejuice is that, as much as I loved it, I never really understood why it was so successful,” he says. For the new film, he reflected on how much his own and his actors’ lives had changed over the decades, and how those changes must have been for the characters. “It just became a very simple, moving movie. It’s a weird family movie, and we’re such a weird family.”

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He says it was also his redemption as a filmmaker. He had been mired in commercial work and lost, like Lydia in the film. “I had been a little disillusioned with the film industry over the last few years,” he says. “I just realized that, you know, if I’m ever going to do anything again, I just want to do it from my heart. … I had kind of lost myself, so, for me, this film was a reinvigoration to get me back to doing what I love to do, the way I love to do it, with people.”

In other words, it’s a lot like the lesson in the movie: reconnect with the people you love and realize that getting older doesn’t necessarily mean you have to grow up.

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