haunted

www.thebiblog.net, haunted, october 31, 2010

tim burton’s beetlejuice house after it has gone through its post-modern transformation

horror film scripts often implicate architects in hauntings. either a house is constructed on top of a native american burial ground, as in the poltergeist films, or else the architect designed the building using black magic, as in ghostbusters. in the film beetlejuice, a haunting occurs in spite of design. after the maitland's, a young couple, die in a horrible car crash, they return to their recently purchased rustic gothic revival home to find that it has been taken over by an obnoxious married couple from new york city, the deetz's. if that weren’t bad enough, the deetz's have brought their interior designer in tow, who through the progression of the film unsympathetically transforms the polite mansion into a post-modern funhouse. in order to halt the house's transformation, the phantasmic maitland's spend the remainder of the film attempting to scare away the intruders, which eventually requires the help of the poltergeist betelgueuse who resides in a scale model of the home located in the attic. by the end of the film, it is unclear to the audience which is more horrific, the undead, or post-modern architecture.

while burton has never used their films to explicitly critique modern architecture, they often contrast gothic and modern aesthetics to create a binary between normal, human, characters and places in their films, and their fantastical counterparts. defying horror movie tropes, burton’s aesthetically scary monsters are more altruistic in their actions than the humans that populate their worlds. monsters and gothic architecture may look old, decayed, and scary, but at their hearts they are good. subsequently, the humans, and modernism, in burton’s films are ill tempered, destructive and rotten. for burton, looks are deceiving.

the message is ironic, given that the format of burton’s art relies on overt fictions, utilizing special effects and puppetry to create the illusions that make up their worlds. the beetlejuice house did not exist prior to filming. exterior shots relied on a full scale pressurized mock up of the house that contained four walls and a canvas roof, making it no more authentic or substantial than the scale model of the home that resided in the maitland's attic. the post-modernism that is derided in the film is ultimately as unreal as the demonic betelgueuse.