Beetlejuice: The strange ending of Beetlejuice, explained

Warning: Spoilers for Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice.

Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceTim Burton's sequel to his 1988 film Beetlejuiceis strange. And of course it is. The first film introduced Burton's joyfully macabre freakiness to the mainstream audience. If Beetlejuice Squared hadn't included at least one character being mauled by a shark in a claymation sequence, and I wanted my money back. Thankfully, that wasn't necessary.

But there is the usual Tim Burton craziness and then there is the “Wait, what the hell am I looking at and why is Jenna Ortega suddenly pregnant?” craziness. The final sequence of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice bursts into the film like a drunken gothic melodrama that has strolled in from another Tim Burton project still in development.

At first I was confused. I couldn't explain what I had just seen. I could tell you that the ending involved a trip to a castle, a wedding, and a weird birth scene. What any of that had to do with what had happened in the 90-plus minutes before – including the whole Monica Bellucci thing that went absolutely nowhere – was a mystery.

But then I rewatched the original – it's on Max – and I actually understood what Burton was trying to achieve. I'm still not sure this ending works, but it's more interesting than I initially gave it credit for, because of a question Winona Ryder's Lydia Deetz asks Adam and Barbara Maitlin, the ghosts trying to drive Lydia's family out of the house they've just moved into. Beetlejuice.

Lydia – a teenager with the ability to see ghosts (an ability downplayed in the film in a way that no young adult Netflix series in 2024 would dare) – has just met the Maitlins and is trying to come to terms with the fact that they are actually just dead ghosts of their former selves.

“What if this is a dream?” she asks them. “Can you use any tricks to prove I'm not dreaming?”

Adam and Barbara, played by Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis, shake their heads in denial.

I think that line stuck with Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, and they applied it to the end of the next chapter in Lydia's story. Everything after the climactic scene in which the weddings of Lydia and Beetlejuice, and Lydia and her actual, manipulative fiancé Rory (Justin Theroux), are thwarted, takes on a surreal, dreamlike quality. The sequence imagines a future in which Lydia and Astrid (Ortega) have fully reconciled and are spending time together, first at Dracula's castle, where Astrid spots a hot guy who may or may not be a vampire.

The film immediately cuts from that moment to Astrid and Hot Vamp happily leaving their wedding ceremony while Lydia beams at them. How much time is supposed to have passed since the beginning of the film, when Astrid was still in high school? Unclear.

Then things get even more bizarre when the scene switches to an operating room where Astrid gives birth to a child who turns out to be the creepy, snarky baby version of Beetlejuice who appears earlier in the film. If we take this scene literally, it is completely confusing. Are we supposed to believe that Beetlejuice impregnated Astrid because: gross. If Astrid fathered this child with Hot Vampire Husband, why does he look like Beetlejuice? The only language in which this scene makes sense is dream language; it is nonsense because dreams are nonsense.

In fact, what happens next seems to confirm that this ending was a dream. In a tribute to the finale of NewhartLydia wakes up in bed, gasping, and Beetlejuice, sleeping next to her, asks her if she's had a nightmare. Before she even has time to consider the idea that Lydia might have married Beetlejuice after all, Burton cuts to the image of Lydia waking from a dream for a second time. This time she's all alone. And that's the end of the film. It elicits an “Oh.” And then a “What?”

The ending makes at least some sense if you look at it as Burton turning Lydia's question from the first film – “What if this is a dream?” – into a thought experiment. It is important to remember that Lydia and her mother, who she Beetlejuice Beetlejuice still alive, seem to have been estranged since their teenage years. Her desire to be a better mother seems central to both the happy and nightmarish parts of her dream. The wedding could represent the elation she hopes to one day experience with Astrid, and the terrifying birth of baby Beetlejuice could symbolize Lydia's fears of having cursed her daughter to a life filled with scary creatures, including possibly the ghost with the most.

But what if we go one step further? What if that final moment, when Lydia wakes up alone, suggests that all Beetlejuice Beetlejuice was just a dream and none of it was real? That's a fun idea, especially if Burton plans to make a third Beetlejuice – you can't say the title of the movie out loud – that pretends the second movie never happened. After years of Marvel movies telling you that each installment in a franchise is a building block for the next, imagine Burton saying, “That sequel I made? It was just a silly little blip that you don't even have to try to remember.” How freeing that would be.

You could Also argue that these final moments tell us that everything about the entire Beetlejuice experience was just a dream Lydia had as a teenager. What if Beetlejuice isn't real, and neither are the Matlins, and the stories told in both films as well as the Broadway musical are just the diary entries of a depressed teenager with the combined fashion taste of Robert Smith and Bob Mackie?

Less entertaining and thought-provoking is the conclusion that Burton and his colleagues were extremely high, the end of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and insisted on leaving it as it was originally written. Because that's also a plausible explanation for the last few minutes of the film. I don't like that so much. I like this better, where Tim Burton is still a couple of steps ahead of us intellectually and still takes his craziness to places the rest of us can barely comprehend.