Who summoned Beetlejuice? The devilish, macabre afterlife of Michael McDowell

When Beetlejuice Beetlejuice premieres, Michael McDowell should be given fuller credit. Photo / Warner Bros, Parisa Taghizadeh

How Michael McDowell – one of Stephen King’s favourite authors and co-creator of the ‘bio-exorcist’- laughed in death’s face until the end.

When Beetlejuice Beetlejuice – one hopes a picture so good, they named it twice – premieres in Venice, there will be all manner of visionary geniuses saluted. Its director Tim Burton, of course, but also its stars Michael Keaton and ingenue-turned-veteran Winona Ryder and the screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Miller, among many others.

Yet one person deserves to be given fuller credit, over and above the contractually obliged “characters co-created by”. This man was Michael McDowell, the co-writer and co-creator (albeit with different people) of the original Beetlejuice film.

McDowell died in 1999, at the age of 49. Yet before his untimely end, he managed to pack a remarkable amount of incident into his brief life, including being described by none other than his friend Stephen King as “the finest writer of paperback originals in America today” and Peter Straub as “one of the best writers of horror in this or any other country”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, his original conception of Beetlejuice was very different to the finished, more sanitised product, and he would never write anything else as successful again. Yet McDowell’s eventful, death-fixated life was, appropriately, even stranger than fiction.

McDowell was born in 1950 and at first appeared to be destined for a distinguished academic career, graduating from Harvard and writing a PhD dissertation entitled – auspiciously enough – American Attitudes Toward Death, 1825–1865. His friend, the poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz, saluted his “devilish – not to say uninhibitedly morbid – sense of humour”, and remarked, “Even at 19, death seemed to him life’s most grotesque joke.”

After graduating, he imagined “a stable, calm existence as a university professor” but soon realised that he lacked the temperament. Inspired by a creative writing course, he instead chose a life of horror. “Bless my naivete,” he later said. “If I had known the trouble it would be to support myself writing fiction, I would never have started the course.”

In the late 70s and early 80s, he wrote a series of pulpy books with titles like The Amulet and Cold Moon Over Babylon. Nobody, least of all McDowell, would have pretended he was writing great literature, but they were commercial, accessible and infused with an ear for Southern Gothic, with what he called its “pervasive friendliness, its offhanded viciousness [and] its overwhelming lassitude”.

In a 1985 interview, he described his work with a refreshing lack of pretension. “I am a commercial writer and I’m proud of that,” he said. “I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.” McDowell was prolific and talented, but what distinguished his work from the other dime-a-dozen paperbacks on the shelves next to it was a fascination, bordering on obsession, with death and mortality, to say nothing of man’s cosmic insignificance. As he put it in 1984, “My philosophy, if I have one, is that the universe is a joke and we are the butt of that joke.”

It was inevitable that he should be drawn to Hollywood, and the industry towards him, and he got his break in the early 80s working on television series, including the revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He contributed the typically macabre episode The Jar, a re-imagining of a 1964 short about a farmer who buys a mysterious jar at a carnival, only to find its contents terrify his wife. The director of the 1984 version of the episode was none other than the 26-year-old Tim Burton, who had yet to make his debut with 1985′s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and the collaboration would prove to be a fruitful one, even if neither knew it at the time.

Betelgeuse was originally a winged demon intent on raping the protagonists’ daughter and killing everyone in town.

McDowell was then working with Larry Wilson, a former production executive who had his own company, Pecos Productions, with Michael Bender, who had previously optioned some of McDowell’s novels. The two men collaborated on an earlier version of Beetlejuice that was considerably darker than the finished film, in which the eponymous “bio-exorcist” Betelgeuse was a winged demon intent on raping the protagonists’ daughter and killing everyone in town.

The car crash in which human protagonists the Maitlands perish was far more grim and realistic than the abrupt comic demise in Burton’s picture. The script direction notes that Geena Davis’s character Barbara “is wailing in pain and fright”. It was given the working title House Ghosts.

When the draft was completed, Wilson handed it to a senior executive at Universal Pictures, and was summoned to a meeting almost immediately. Expecting praise and a lucrative deal, he was instead given a dressing-down. The executive said “What are you doing with your career? This piece of weirdness, this is what you’re going to go out into the world with? You’re developing into a very good executive. You’ve got great taste in material. Why are you going to squander all that for this piece of s***?”

Wilson, who believed in both the project and McDowell, shrugged off the contemptuous criticism, and the screenplay was sold to the Geffen Company instead; the executive who championed it, Marjorie Lewis, threatened to quit if they did not buy it.

McDowell continued to receive screen credit, both for story and screenplay, and Burton, who had directed Pee Wee’s Big Adventure for Geffen’s parent company Warner Bros, loved the script. As the critic David Edelstein later observed: “He thought he could have written it himself. It carried his trademark blend of the outlandish and the matter-of-fact.” Yet Burton, although already an acknowledged maestro of the macabre, did not want to tarnish his reputation by making an edgy horror picture. Instead, he hired the screenwriter Warren Skaaren to turn McDowell and Wilson’s screenplay into something more accessible (and, crucially, PG rather than R-rated).

Following the success of supernatural movies like Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, screenwriter Michael McDowell came up with a new idea: ‘what if we took the movie cliché of good people being haunted by bad ghosts, and flipped it?’ and developed it into a script, calling it… pic.twitter.com/tznjYIp6dZ

— All The Right Movies (@ATRightMovies) April 6, 2024

Under normal circumstances, this would have led to a dilution, even a bowdlerisation, of McDowell’s vision, but in fact Skaaren and McDowell had an unusually harmonious collaboration. Skaaren shared a similar interest in mortality with both Burton and McDowell; one of his favourite books was Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, a high-minded scientific exploration of human attitudes towards dying.

Although Beetlejuice’s finished script was goofier and more overtly humorous than McDowell and Wilson’s version, there were still traces of something wacky and weird; McDowell’s long-term partner Laurence Senelick, who he met when an undergraduate at Harvard, recalled that the scene in which Betelgeuse visits a brothel was inspired by items in the writer’s own collection. “It is actually based on a series of 19th-century French stereograph cards of devils doing various things in hell,” he told the Ringer. “We not only owned the set. We also had a book about it, and lent Tim the book.”

Once the film was completed, it was a vast commercial success, and then Burton went on to Batman, which was an even bigger hit and cemented his standing as the hottest director in Hollywood. However, the studio wanted a sequel to Beetlejuice, and Skaaren’s effort, revolving around a romantic triangle and entitled Beetlejuice in Love, was not deemed to be viable. In any case, the screenwriter’s interest in mortality would soon find a grim consummation when he was diagnosed with bone cancer and died at the age of 44. McDowell was asked to participate in the creation of a follow-up film but declined, citing an old southern expression: “I don’t like to chew my cabbage twice.”

Beetlejuice’s finished script was goofier and more overtly humorous than McDowell and Wilson’s version.

He may have expected a glittering and lucrative career of his own, but it was not to be. Although he worked on A Nightmare Before Christmas, Burton’s stop-motion animation, in which he is credited for “screen adaptation”, and co-wrote the 1996 horror picture, an adaptation of Stephen King’s work, with Tom Holland – no relation to either the actor or historian – success had warped him. As Senelick later recalled: ‘He’d work, and work, and work, and then he’d go out and play, and play, and play. The intensity burns people out.” He firstly turned to cocaine, then alcohol, and the level of his substance abuse rendered him unable to work. Senelick eventually asked that they separate until McDowell cleaned himself up, which, eventually, he did. And then, as ill fortune would have it, the writer was diagnosed with Aids in 1994.

As befitted a man who had always been more than half in love with easeful death – and indeed collected memorabilia that would eventually fill 76 boxes and included everything from plaques from children’s coffins to death pins – McDowell reacted to his diagnosis with equanimity. Although Senelick described his partner’s affliction as “the plagues of Job, basically… one damn thing after another”, McDowell was philosophical and, of course, retained a dark wit.

As he wrote in a Harvard magazine: “Having studied death for a couple of decades, collected it, thought about it endlessly, I wasn’t blind-sided by my infection. It has of course made a difference in my life: I no longer read my horoscope or open fortune cookies. I have learned a great deal about medicine and medical research in America, and I am adjusting my sense of my personal history so that my idea of longevity is now 50 years. But I am still planting trees and spring bulbs and have genuine hope of seeing the new millennium.”

How good is Michael McDowell's BLACKWATER? Well, we're obsessed enough to have bought all these editions of it. And no, you can't have them! pic.twitter.com/djuaGWQjgo

— Valancourt Books (@Valancourt_B) October 11, 2017

He would miss it by a mere four days. Yet up to the end, he retained his black sense of humour. “Recently a friend asked if I felt cheated, and the question came as a surprise. ‘There is no guarantee,’ I told her, ‘that I will die before you do...’” He worked up until his death on novels and screenplays, as well as providing the inspiration for one of the stories in Burton’s collection The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy. His final book was, appropriately enough, a posthumous collaboration with King’s wife Tabitha, Candles Burning, which was published in 2006.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is therefore an unlikely tribute of sorts to its creator, although Senelick believed that his partner would have retained scepticism about any sequel. “I think he would be very hands-off,” he said in 2018. “If people wanted to do it and it works, then well, you get the royalties.”

Yet it would be all too appropriate, amid the hoo-ha and special effects at the premiere, if a lone, sardonic chuckle could be heard: the sound of one of the strangest visionaries ever brought into Hollywood getting the last laugh, a quarter-century after his death.