Nightmare Fuel / Beetlejuice

"We've come for your daughter, Chuck."

"Day-o... me say day-o...! *sudden switch to minor key* Daylight come and me wan' go..."

— The start of the movie's opening theme.

The Movie

• Betelgeuse Snake, a serpentine version of Betelgeuse with an exaggerated version of his normal head complete with wide eyes with slit pupils especially that frighteningly creepy leer on his face when he corners Lydia. It even got referenced in the Shin Megami Tensei series of games, as the boss enemy Echidna in Shin Megami Tensei II.
  • If you thought Betelgeuse in snake form was scary, here's what it originally was supposed to look like.
• The scene where Barbara tries to scare Delia and Otho by hanging herself in a closet, letting out a blood-curdling scream, and then ripping off her own face with her eyeballs dangling out by the sockets.
  • Fortunately for them, they can't see her. They're more horrified at how small the closet is.
• Then Barbara cuts Adam's head off. Again, Delia and Otho don't see them. They're more disgusted by how tacky the room they're in looks.
• Barbara and Adam's transformations, where Barbara stretches her face into an elongated horror with her eyeballs in her mouth and Adam makes his face beak-shaped while pressing his hand against his skull to make a head-crest with eyeballs on his fingers while now lacking eyes. If Lydia's reaction is any indication, it would've succeeded in frightening off the Deetzes if they could see them- which was the initial intention.
• Given the theme of ghosts resembling their corpses at the moment of death... just stop and think of some of the horrible ways that people have died.
  • Shrunken Head guy◊, a lady who got divided in two, apparently in a botched magic trick, a guy run over by a car and reduced to a realistic pancake, and a guy who set himself on fire from smoking- being reduced to a blackened skeleton with his normal face barely intact to create an unsettling image...and so on.
  • People who commit suicide become civil servants in the afterlife. The receptionist (a former beauty queen) still has open slits on her wrists, Juno has a slit throat, the "flattened man" is hinted to have thrown himself into traffic (he can't even move properly by himself and is hoisted around on a system of pulleys), several of the desk clerks are just skeletons, and another man still dangles from the noose he used to hang himself. They're creepy enough; what must people who shot themselves in the head look like? Really, the only reason this afterlife doesn't fall under And I Must Scream is because the dead don't seem to be in any pain.
• The Sandworm, an alien and nightmarish black and white worm with red eyes with a perpetually angry second head with eerily human-looking eyes within the first head that apparently live on Saturn.
  • Made worse by the fact that apparently according to the newspapers Betelgeuse reads, there is apparently an entire population of these creatures and are said to eat any ghosts that happen to leave their parameters and aren't rescued in time.
• Betelgeuse himself... and not just when he's in his giant-snake form. In the movie he's an evil force of insane chaos, can change form at will into anything- usually nightmarish forms like weapons or beasts, and he's not above killing people to get what he wants- in fact, his main job is a bio-exorcist- whose job is to kill the living which he takes pride in and has likely done so before. And he attempts to marry Lydia in order to get permanent access to the living world to either be a ghost with no parameters or a living being with potentially the same powers to do whatever horrific fancy pleases him.
  • The fact he is willing to marry Lydia, a teenager against her will, is not only revolting as he's an implied multi-centennial being with perverted tendencies but what he intends to do with her afterward is never described.
  • The manner in which Juno describes Betelgeuse before he truly appears, the tone suddenly gets darker when she talks about him. He was an assistant of hers before deciding to go off on his own to get rid of the living before being sealed away with the requirements of calling his name three times and needing marriage to be permanently free. All while an eerie yellow light suddenly illuminated the room. With this in mind, the subtle revelation implies that Betelgeuse may not be a perverted and crazy ghost with phenomenal powers, but something akin to the Devil.
• Juno disappears in a smoke-like manner which looks unsettling when Adam asks to how to get in touch with her- emerging from her neck due to it being slit from a suicide attempt in life.
• The séance, which is supposed to be a way to contact the spirits of Adam and Barbara, is actually an exorcism. Seeing their ghosts being slowly destroyed, shriveling, and aging... AAAAAHHHH!
  • That's not normal aging you're seeing. That's decaying. They're taking on the appearance of their physical corpses, rotting in the ground. Imagine being awake and aware inside a body that's rapidly rotting...
  • The previously-seen fate that would have awaited them: the Room of Lost Souls.
  • The hallway of the Room of Lost Souls is distorted with unnatural angles and if one notices the door next to the Room of Lost Souls has a figure pressing against the door and attempting to claw out. Compared to the darkly comedic office room, it has a subtly off, eerie vibe.
  • Even before anything actually happens, the séance has a really frightening, ominous build-up.
    Otho: To the living, let now the dead... come alive. (all lights in the room save the candle go out on their own)
• The scene where Beetlejuice eats the fly.
• The bit where the dinner guests are made to perform the Banana Boat Song, arguably the film's Signature Scene, is hilarious to watch and uncomfortable to imagine, as the unwitting people are made to sing and dance against their will before being made to watch as hands reach out of their dinner plates and grab them.
• The Maitlands' immediate situation after death. They arrived soaked without knowledge of how they returned, Barbara's fingers catch fire when she gets too close to the fireplace, and when Adam attempts to retrace their steps, he somehow emerges in an alien desert populated by a serpentine unknown creature that causes time to go much slower. Barbara pulls him back in time before the creature attacks him and shows that they have no reflection and are in fact ghosts. It's gradual and subtly scary revelation that they died and they're in a completely unknown situation.
  • In the original version of this scene, instead of the alien desert, Adam finds himself in a black void with giant clock parts appearing at random, implying that he's somehow outside time and space itself.
  • Adam's line of "We're dead, I don't know if we don't have to worry about anything anymore" to Barbara, reiterates the sentiment of the horror of their initial situation when she complains.
    • How they died, due to how sudden it was. They're driving back from getting Adam some paints when a dog frightens them into swerving to the side of the passage bridge and are left barely hanging by a thread with the dog's weight being the only thing keeping the car from falling over. The dog gets off and the Maitlands plummet to their demise. It sets up the darker tone of the film after being light-hearted for the first few minutes.
• The abstract and alien statues of Delia that Betelgeuse suddenly brings to life, grow in size and hold Charlie and Delia Deetzes in place to prevent them from interfering with the wedding.
• The priest Betelgeuse summons, a short corpse-like being with completely empty eyesockets- leaving only two pitch black holes where the eyes would be, not helped by its distorted deep voice.
• While played for dark humor, Betelgeuse's terrifying face he shows the Maitlands is so terrifying that it's only seen from the back with eldritch tendrils popping out with no indication of what the actual face really looked at that moment- elevating the horror even more.

The Animated Series

• Just the beginning of the second intro! The original one wasn't that bad, but the second opening starts out with Beetlejuice's rotting corpse sitting inside a coffin as he's summoned by Lydia chanting his name three times. The look in his eyes as he awakens is disturbing.
  • It isn't helped by the fact that a spider CRAWLS UP IN HIS NOSE AND OUT OF HIS EYEBALL.
• In the Bad Future of "Pest o' the West," Lydia is forced to marry an anthropomorphic bull ghost named Bully the Crud. This is a case of Nightmare Fuel both In-Universe and for the viewer. Imagine being a living human female, forced into marriage with a dead animal... who then somehow manages to sire multiple children on you. The implications are horrible if you think about them too much. One can only imagine how horrified Lydia's parents must feel when they realize who their son-in-law is.
  • I mean, there is the possibility he already had them and they're her stepchildren or that he adopted them, because seeing as Lydia is twelve, I don't want to consider the alternative.
  • Also, judging by her suddenly white hair and pale teal skin in BJ's Bad Future vision, it's heavily implied that Lydia somehow died during that time.
• Lydia's creepy smile in the gross-off episode when she's trying to convince her father he's having a dream. (For context, Beetlejuice is making ugly faces behind her and Charles walked into the room in a sleepy stupor.) The main thing which keeps it from being too unsettling is the fact that Charles is totally unfazed, and only wants to clarify whether the nightmare is hers or his own.
• Anytime Beetlejuice is acting like a Depraved Kids' Show Host. The way he says "kiddies" is particularly disturbing.

Musical

• Due to the logistics of the play's format, instead of a snake, this version has Beetlejuice summon a giant version of himself that chases the Deetzes and their associates out of the house.
• The depiction of the Netherworld in this version:
  • As Juno puts it, it's a lonely place and an "infinite abyss of nothingness." The movie at least showed the Netherworld had an office space and implied there was more to it, and the cartoon portrayed the Netherworld as its own dimension entirely, but the play turns it into a massive abyss that everybody who's ever died ends up. It's even implied (and outright confirmed in the DC tryout) that unless you're a demon or a human, you can't leave the Netherworld once you enter. Lydia searches as far as she can and doesn't find her mother, even comparing it to the "emptiness of space." No wonder Miss Argentina tells Lydia and Charles to go home while they still can.
  • Adam reads from the Handbook for the Recently Deceased and tries to open a door to the Netherworld to help Lydia find her mom. However, he is hypnotized by the door, and if it weren't for Barbara and Lydia stopping him, he likely would've been trapped there for eternity.
  • The original opening song "The Hole" is scary to listen to. The song is about Beetlejuice explaining the concept of death, and the description of the Netherworld he gives is downright terrifying: once you die, what's left of you (BJ specifically denies that it's a "soul" as we understand the concept) goes down to wherever it is Beetlejuice is, and what do you find there? A hole. You climb in, it seals up, and that's it. Forever.
• Beetlejuice tells Lydia he can't leave the house after she frees him, and so demonstrates why, by opening the front door, only for a massive Sand Worm to appear and nearly devour the pair and his clones.
• The exorcism in this version. Instead of a misunderstanding to summon the Maitlands, this version has Beetlejuice trick Lydia into thinking she can bring her mother back to life by reading from the handbook. Instead, it starts to destroy Barbara. BJ offers to fix it, on the condition that Lydia marry him so he can become human again; but when Adam and Charles refuse on her behalf, he wrecks havoc and puts the blame squarely at Lydia's feet.
  Beetlejuice: You messed with the wrong book, now look what you've done!
  • And why did he trick her? Out of spite when he believed she was going to leave him.
  • Barbara's screams also count. While the movie had the Maitlands stay silent, this version has us hear Barbara's screams of agony. To get Lydia to come to a decision quicker, he also makes Barbara scream repeatedly.
• After Lydia (and Charles) jump into the Netherworld to avoid her fate with BJ, BJ quickly decides on a new course of action against Delia, Otho, and the Maitlands.
  Beetlejuice: Why does everyone keep leaving me?! All right, new plan: you're all going to die. Today!
  • His version of this includes a game show style segment where he tortures the characters by strapping one of them to a torture wheel and spinning it. Otho is first up, and Delia willingly lets him be tortured once he reveals he's a fraud. We never see or hear from Otho after BJ spins the wheel, leaving his fate to interpretation.
    • In the touring production, Otho is instead put into a guillotine-like stockade, and executed by Delia after he derides her for being a flake. Doesn't make it any less frightening.
• Juno is changed in this version from an efficient, ghostly Beleaguered Bureaucrat into a demon, Director of Netherworld Customs and Processing, and Beetlejuice's overbearing mother, with power able to surpass Beetlejuice himself. After Lydia refuses to go with her, she has this to say to the Deetzes and the Maitlands:
  Juno: You want to stay together? You can die together!
  • Her appearance in this version is scary. In the movie, beyond her slit throat, Juno was one of the most normal looking members of the Afterlife. But in this version, she is an old, shriveled woman with a tracheostomy, and a beehive hairdo. She looks more in line with a typical Tim Burton character than most of the cast.

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