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Beetlejuice is a movie about interior design. You might think it’s a story about a dead couple and anarchic zombies, but it’s actually about interiors.
The dead couple at the center of the film, the Maitlands, live in a Connecticut village full of graveyards and brothels (in reality (Photographed in Vermont). . The house’s new owners, the Dietz family, have stripped out the original interior and transformed the house into an over-the-top postmodern fantasy. We’re supposed to be on the Maitland family’s side, decorated like grandma’s. but why? The problem cannot be gentrification. After all, Maitland is also gentrifying. And PoMo’s renovations, frankly, aren’t that shabby. Glass bricks backlit with blue neon and a green-tinged fireplace (based on Michael Graves’ design for Charles Jenks’ Cosmic House in London) provide a portal to another world. It’s pretty cool. So in a sense, the interior narrative is very conservative, about leaving things as they are.
This week, an exhibition about Burton’s world opens at London’s Design Museum, partially exploring the large part of Tim Burton’s imagination that architecture occupies. From the candy-colored suburbs of Edward Scissorhands to the vibrant dark deco nightscapes of Batman’s version of Gotham, we’ve seen how the director travels from suburbia to haunted houses and somehow ends up in twisted, trippy, and hysterical places. You can see how you got there. A toy store that became a feature of his later films and television.
The Cosmic House fireplace, one of the inspirations for the PoMo renovation © Sue Barr
The exhibition begins, much like Burton himself, in the “suburbs.” Born in 1958, he grew up in an ordinary one-story house in Burbank, California. In that modest suburban home, you can see what he has always run away from. Cold War paranoia. mid-century consumerism. The cult status of Avon Lady Tupperware. Sameness — something that all teens strive to leave behind, knowing that they are different in some way.
It is the raw suburbia that evokes the eeriness. Reality is always scarier. I can wake up from a nightmare
Burton, of course, was different. His version of Suburbia, especially his version of Edward Scissorhands, is the pinnacle of his horror. Not a haunted castle with its spiky towers on the horizon, but the false cheerfulness of nearby suburban houses. There is a hint of repressed fear. A dog with hair that almost matches the dinosaur topiary, but it’s the setting’s grinning, 1950s nuclear tradfiness that makes it so creepy.
he is not alone. Other directors go all-in on suburban horror without resorting to overt traditional horror tropes. Think of David Lynch and his severed ear on the lawn in the title sequence of Blue Velvet, or the noisy dumpsters in the Baltimore suburbs where all of John Waters’ films are set. Think Halloween, Poltergeist, or the gated city at dusk in Jordan Peele’s Get Out. The horror isn’t improved by more realistic presentation, rather it’s the raw suburbia that truly evokes the creepy. Reality is always scarier. You can wake up from a nightmare.
Burton’s first short story, “Vincent” (1982, with a wonderfully sonorous narration by Vincent Price), is about a misunderstood child struggling with gothic anxieties in a suburban home. It is precisely in the contrast between the everydayness of the interior and the darkness of a lonely child’s imagination that the fun unfolds. This juxtaposition, rather than the recent excesses of drugstore, Halloween, and Gothic, is the source of the director’s real power.
Burton’s version of suburbia, especially that of Edward Scissorhands, is the pinnacle of his horror © TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy
The divergence from what Burton was accustomed to, into the acid-trip extremes of CGI and gothic caricature, meant that his new film Beetlejuice began to resemble Burton’s theme park, divorced from the realities of domestic design. means. That’s not all. He is now competing with an AI to create a Burton-esque world that is more than he can manage.
And beyond Burton, the House of Horrors goes even further. Scary movies are now just as likely to be set in brutalist housing estates (Skyscrapers and Attack the Block) or industrial blockades (the awful Saw series and its imitators) as they are in suburbia or edgy Gothic housing estates. It becomes more sexual. castle. The claustrophobic atmosphere of Beetlejuice’s house has faded, with the sequel expanding into an afterlife city. And the postmodernist makeover that made this house so memorable has been removed (though I liked the Christo-esque black veil that covered it).
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The enduring affection for the original Beetlejuice is grounded very firmly in the idea that home is a place of both desire and anxiety. It is both an asset and a source of anxiety, something that can be taken away from you and, worse, any trace of your life erased. Beetlejuice The surreal landscape of Beetlejuice’s afterlife is beyond our control, beyond our knowledge, and therefore has little impact on us. To truly shock, moviegoers need to break away from the familiarity of home, the embodiment of our hopes and aspirations. Purgatory may be fun for production designers, but it’s nothing compared to its postmodern makeover.
The World of Tim Burton will be on view at the Design Museum in London until April 21, 2025.
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