How ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Retained The Charm Of Its 1988 Predecessor Through Sound

One of the main problems plaguing legacy sequels is that they are too quick to adopt modern advancements in filmmaking, argues veteran sound designer/editor Jimmy Boyle. Sometimes, the old ways really are better. That was his guiding philosophy while crafting the soundscape for Tim Burton’s long-awaited Beetlejuice sequel — Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (a clever nod to the fact that Michael Keaton’s anarchic agent of spectral chaos can only appear when his name is uttered three times in a row).

“You don’t really want to mess with it too much, you just want to bring it up to date as much as you can without overdoing it,” Boyle tells me over Zoom. “The charm of the film, is that so much of it was done with practical effects and it feels in the same world [of the original], whereas so many sequel films now… The technology has come on so far, that everyone jumps to use tons of CG and cutting-edge visual effects. But then it feels so disconnected from the originals.”

Boyle, who previously worked with Burton on the director’s live-action remake of Dumbo at Disney, is a major Beetlejuice fan from way back. “It was just so different than [anything else at the time]. I thought it was wacky and great and really interesting and hilarious,” he says. “I [also] loved the setting of it all. Growing up with Goonies and Beetlejuice, I’m a bit of a sucker for anything set in a picturesque American town where people are fed up or bored. But it looks really interesting. You think, ‘I’d quite like to have gone to one of these places as a kid and go exploring.’ When you set something in a place like that, it becomes a character in and of itself.”

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As such, he was the perfect person to help guide audiences back to the place where it all began — the quaint New England hamlet of Winter River — alongside Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara), and teenage daughter Astrid (played by Jenna Ortega, the breakout star of the Burton-directed Wednesday series on Netflix). According to Boyle, Burton’s biggest directive in terms of the sonic palette for the main setting was to “try and celebrate that Americana.”

On the flip side of things (quite literally), the Netherworld occupied by the recently, and not-so-recently, deceased needed to come off as eerie and a place where earthly rules of sound no longer apply. “He’d be like, ‘Okay, we really need to establish that we’re somewhere strange,’” Boyle remembers.

The audience gets a re-introduction to the afterlife when a French graffiti artist (Sami Slimane) working for Delia accidentally falls down a New York City manhole and ends up in the tiled, off-kilter hallway from the first movie. “We just had fun with that. It’s just very weird tones in there,” notes Boyle. “When he walks toward Danny [DeVito]’s character, his feet are doing this weird thing where you can hear the footstep coming. It’s like a strange reverse reverb thing. We’re setting off the space, but the reverb is going into every foot, not the back of every foot.”

At the same time, Boyle knew he could rely on Burton’s unique and visually-driven sense of the macabre that didn’t need much augmentation. “Once you get into the Netherworld and the waiting room with the muzak and the various characters that have all died in these peculiar fashions ... Once you start describing a lot of those great images, you’re halfway there. You don’t really need to keep doing the creepy tones or so much stuff that’s strange once you set that up. A lot of it sets itself up.”

When it came to everyone’s favorite Bio-Exorcist, Boyle was asked to accentuate the character’s wacky eccentricities without overshadowing Keaton. “Tim talks about Tex Avery, ‘Make some of these things as cartoony as possible,’” the sound designer explains. “We tried to put in little bits of funny things for his movements and sounds ... [but] you have to be careful because the dialogue is [crucial]. Michael Keaton’s performance is hilarious, but he’s also putting on this voice and he’s very quick when he speaks, so you want to make sure people are getting what he’s saying. It’s your job to make it as funny as it can be, but also stay out the way of his dialogue, so as not to confuse any story.”

Oh, and let’s not forget about the grotesque spawn of Beetlejuice, which Burton wanted to be “this horrible little thing,” Boyle says, admitting he might have “went a bit too far” on his first attempt to give the child a voice. “I tried to vocalize something myself that I then treated as this baby [but it] just turned out slightly too monstrous. And then, weirdly, I ended up playing with normal baby stuff and twisting it and making it slightly cartoony and putting it on a turnable and moving it around. Then adding little bits of vocalization and stuff and other things like dog sound effects, little Jack Russell Terriers ... That was an interesting first challenge.”

Since its wide theatrical debut in early September, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has accrued over $440 million at the worldwide box office (for comparison, the original closed out its big screen tenure with just $74 million). Could the sequel’s impressive, almost supernatural, returns mean a third entry is in the cards? Will we, perhaps, finally get to see a version of Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian? There’s certainly a thirst for another sip of “Juice,” even among viewers who were born long after 1988. Take Boyle’s 4-year-old son, for instance.

“He said, ‘Daddy, you need to go and make Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice tonight, so I can watch it tomorrow morning,’”Boyle reveals. “I was like, ‘Well, there’s quite a lot that goes into these things and it’s not just me. There’s a man named Tim and thousands and thousands of other people that go into making these. It’s not quite that simple.’ But my little boy has already asked that question.”