Goth Gilmore Girls

The first looks we’ve gotten at Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s legacy sequel of the 1980s horror-comedy classic Beetlejuice, really didn’t give away much about the new movie except nostalgia vibes and that Lydia Deetz has a daughter. The new trailer, though, coming just about six weeks before the films opens, actually lays out the plot and it is not what I expected.

Astrid Deetz, played by Jenna Ortega, has the same kind of cool goth girl vibes as Lydia did when she was a girl, but unlike her mom, she’s not into the spooky and the scary—she doesn’t even believe in ghosts. Which is a problem when she goes back to Winter River and learns about her mom’s past with supposed ghosts, and somehow gets pulled into the afterlife. It is Lydia, then, who must summon Betelgeuse to help save Astrid. Is this giving away too much? Absolutely! But I think they were kind of backed into this corner by the first couple of trailers being a little TOO vague on details. If they had just told us from the beginning that Astrid was a skeptic, I think that would have been enough for us to understand the basic gist without overrunning details about Betelgeuse’s return and team-up with Lydia.

But this also harks back to an overall problem with legacy sequels I previously identified—original characters can’t change much (not a problem for Twisters!). This whole setup of a skeptical Astrid who thinks her mom is lame and doesn’t believe their quaint New England haunted mansion is actually haunted would work a LOT better if either Astrid or Lydia was “normal”. Like, either Astrid needs to be a typical teen who is embarrassed by her spooky goth séance mom, OR Lydia needs to have morphed into a big-dumb-cup mom who has astringently hid her ghostly past from her daughter…who is into all the spooky stuff Lydia once claimed as her own.

Do you see how that contrast immediately works so much better? Either Astrid’s skepticism needs to be such that she’s NOT a goth like her mom, or Lydia needs to have buried her own inner goth so well that the inevitable revelation of Lydia’s haunted past is a truly shocking moment that eventually heals the rift between them. Having them both be spooky goth types, though, undercuts the inherent tension of a mother and daughter who don’t share a foundational belief system, because their aesthetics are so similar it’s like, how far apart are you, really? Making them too similar lessens the dramatic tension, but again, legacy sequels almost demand that characters don’t change drastically between installments (i.e.: sitcom rules).

As is, we’re going on an adventure with Lydia to save Astrid accompanied by Betelgeuse who is also maybe running away from staple-face Monica Bellucci and Willem Dafoe and Justin Theroux are there, too. Astrid thinks Lydia is lame, but beyond disagreeing on ghosts, they just seem like the Goth Gilmore Girls. Does that make Betelgeuse Luke?