Total Recall: Ghosts of Movies Past

Beetlejuice (1988)



Tomatometer: 82%

Tim Burton’s “look” — which resembles German Expressionism, addled with dry
British wit, channeled through late-50’s magazine camp — was never so easy to
identify as in Beetlejuice. It was all there: the tongue-in-cheek comedy
of shrunken heads, the irksome brightness of Dia de los Muertos candy, the
light-heartedness of suicide victims — and the absurdity of high art. Nothing
was sacred, and that was right funny. From the “Handbook of the Recently
Deceased” (available on Amazon) to the cloying agendas of thrill-pedaling,
upscale, ghost hunters, this story of two newlyweds who find themselves, shall
we say, indisposed to the living, takes liberties with many virtues, and
depicted the afterlife as a den of bureaucratic meanderings, peppered with the
occasional silver screen starlet (Sylvia Sydney as the head paper pusher!).
Michael Keaton stole the show as the title character and an uncharacteristically
subdued Alec Baldwin played the ideal straight man with Geena Davis and Winona
Ryder, both in their heyday. Catherine O’Hara and Jeffrey Jones rounded out a
cast of players Burton would use again, most confusingly in Batman. I
suppose if you think the afterlife looks like a freaky DMV, Beetlejuice as
Batman is not so big a leap. “Beetlejuice means something good: that imaginative
artists can bring a fading genre back from the dead,” wrote Richard Corliss of Time.

(1982)

Considered by many to be among the best horror films of the decade, Poltergeist
was one of the first truly scary movies that succeeded while remaining below the
R-rating threshold — but with Tobe Hooper at the helm and Steven Spielberg on
writing and producing duties, this certainly isn’t surprising. The story
revolves around an all-American family whose home suddenly becomes infested with
poltergeists, mischievous spirits known for moving inanimate objects around. It
soon becomes apparent that their visitors are up to no good, and the family
enlists the help of experts, resulting in some terrifying experiences. While
several spirits are responsible for the earlier, more playful scenes, the film
becomes significantly darker when one of them, referred to only as “The Beast,”
begins wreaking havoc on the family. Though the Beast and the poltergeists
themselves don’t make very many appearances in the film, they are both haunting
and ferocious when they do, as with the ghastly image of a woman at the top of
the stairs. If you have yet to see this movie, treat yourself to a classic;
you’ll never look at fried chicken the same way again. “Poltergeist works
— and works extraordinarily well — because it shows us the horrors of beyond
coming to haunt us not in a moldering house on a hill or a grimy dungeon but
rather in a gleaming, modern, comfortable suburban housing development,” wrote
James Rocchi of Netflix.