‘Beetlejuice’ ending explained: What happens to Betelguse?
It’s hard to think of any other director who could have made Tim Burton’s brilliantly bonkers 1988 cult classic Beetlejuice work. From the afterlife to a desert dimension ruled by sandworms. From a dead couple acting as substitute parents for a couple still living, to a marriage made in hell. From reverse exorcisms to failed seances. And topping it all off, the calypso sound of Harry Belafonte!
It’s not just Burton, though, who excelled in making the seemingly nonsensical make sense on screen. Michael Keaton has an absolute blast playing the wisecracking ghost of the title, who styles himself as a “bio-exorcist” as in, a lost soul capable of expelling the living from the dead, rather than the other way around.
Meanwhile, Winona Ryder looks born to play Lydia Deetz, a self-described “strange and unusual” teenager who befriends the ghost couple haunting her family home. The Maitland ghosts first enlisted Betelgeuse to get rid of Lydia and her parents from the house they inhabited when they were living. But it’s the Maitlands themselves who are almost sent packing, as Deetz family friend Otho nearly exorcises their spirits out of the living world altogether by accident.
Desperate to save her dead friends, Lydia pleads with Betelgeuse to help her by unexorcising them. But he has a nasty surprise for her. He’ll only agree to help her on the condition that she marries him, allowing him to return to the realm of the living. “Think of it as a marriage of inconvenience,” he jokes.
And what happens during the wedding ceremony?
Left with no other choice, Lydia agrees to his terms. Betelgeuse promptly returns the Maitlands back to their original ghostly forms, trading them in for the lives of the ghosthunters Other has brought to his seance. Lydia then realises what she’s done, as Betelgeuse prepares their wedding ceremony. “No!” she cries, attempting to say his name three times – the only thing that will send him away from the realm of the living.
When he stops her from speaking, the dead Maitlands attempt to intervene, but he shuts them up too. He banishes Barbara Maitland to another dimension with a surreal desert landscape inhabited by sandworms, which she and her husband, Adam, encountered earlier in the movie.
Just as a minister of the deceased is about to pronounce Betelgeuse and Lydia man and wife, Barbara somehow returns from the other dimension – through a wormhole, perhaps? – crashing through the ceiling of the house on the back of a sandworm. The sandworm swallows Betelgeuse whole before disappearing out of sight and mind.
The Maitlands and Deetzes exchange sheepish looks, as their ordeal is over. Beetlejuice, on the other hand, is now stuck in waiting for the recently deceased, with over nine billion people ahead of him in the queue to get his death processed. When he steals the number of the voodoo headshrinker he’s sitting next to, he duly has his own head shrunk down to a minuscule size.
In the film’s soon-to-be-released sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, we expect to find out just how Betelgeuse is going to make his way back from the afterlife. And, if Burton’s in the mood for explaining the inexplicable, how he was consumed by a sandworm from another dimension.