It had to happen. The men with butterfly nets. . . . . coming after Beetlejuice.
Maybe someone called “to report him”.
For the crime of being “strange and unusual” if not jittery-jabbing manic like tangled, unwashed hair and maybe a crack-pipe. Like a fish out of water, Beetlejuice comes from a eerily familiar but dated land back there in “The Netherworld”, circa 1988. He speaks strangely—he smells funny. He rambles on, so.
Most of Tim Burton’s characters are bizarre oddballs wandering around the periphery of bland, ordinary society like morbid, mythic spaces and tumbled-down houses like harried, restless energies.
Is he a danger to himself or others? That’s up for a psychologist to determine. . . . .
See him strapped to the gurney, loaded into the ambulance as the flat-screen monitor by the steering wheel captures it all, camcorder-style. He’s “just a number”—“like anyone else”. . . . . taken to “the holding tank” for observation.
So it’s the discount asylum-wing through the local hospital chain, where he’s forced to strip and change into scrubs. Patients sent around with glazed, slack-jawed expressions and knock back coffee by the nurse’s station as he attempts to bargain his way out.
He wants to talk to a lawyer—they give him a psychiatrist. And how their paid to be clinical and dispassionate. The orderlies are called and carry him out between them, trailing his feet behind him on the carpet. His brain scan turns out “empty” with abnormally low gray matter.
Fast-talking, yet stupid.
“A fool, we have hear gentleman. But the question remains: what kind of fool?”
He’s upgraded to a secret military experiment where they intend to hook electrodes up to his brain and dissect him, afterwards. He’d better get out of this one. . . . .
As they’re sharpening the scalpel, he rises from the bed in an aura of rotten, sickly green light like the kid rising from the bed in “The Exorcist”. He farts brimstone—a plume of flame as the doctors cover their faces “in horror”. Little gremlins fly in and loosen his bonds—and next thing you know he’s loaded himself into a wheelchair and is scooting down the hallway at a rapid clip, past gurneys and military doctors as he’s chased by soldiers.
Incidentally, followed by his IV. Stand which gets caught between the swinging double-doors.
Beetlejuice tugs and tugs, and the IV pops loose as he’s running down the ward with his arms stretched in front of him and jams himself into a janitorial-closet.
Frenzied knocking and yelling.
But he takes out a piece of chalk and draws a door—remarkably, “becoming real” as it swings open with the crumbling rumble of deep-rot and he escapes (for now).
Back in the netherworld. . . . . “out of soul-credits” He’ll have to bargain at the window-desk of fate—butting his way to the head of the line, “without taking a number”– and put-up his existence “in purgatory” for collateral—a fate worse than death.
One last chance. . . . . will he team-up with Lydia again and save planet earth? Or will he fool her into taking his place in the lost, moaning eternities of agony? As if there was never a trick up his filthy sleeve. I’ve never known him to be “extremely-selfish”. . . . .
Lydia remains skeptical, at best. She won’t sell her soul, “even for rock n’ roll”. Or her hand in marriage back in the original film. But will she do so to save her friends as St. Louis rumbles at the border-dimension of total ghost-world destruction?
Maybe this idea for a sequel “isn’t so crazy of an idea, after-all”.
Keep watching, kids.
Beetlejuice 2 Fan-Fiction 