beetlejuice
Danny Elfman / GEffEn
Thirty years ago, a bug-eyed bio-exorcist liberated Danny Elfman’s spirit. “Beetlejuice was tons of fun because it was way off the radar,” the composer recalled. “I was so amazed that my score to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure wasn’t thrown out… So, by the time Beetlejuice came along, I decided to just really have fun with it.”
Previously the singer of new-wave performance-art project The Mystic Knights Of The Oingo Boingo, Elfman came to movies via the comic fantasy Forbidden Zone (1980) and Tim Burton’s 1985 Pee-wee pic. Elfman would make bigger (Batman), more romantic (Edward Scissorhands) music for Burton than 1988’s Beetlejuice, his second collaboration with the director; The Nightmare Before Christmas, meanwhile, banked him an eternity of reissues.
But it was Beetlejuice that flung the doors wide open on the duo’s goth-com circus, thanks to its delirious disregard for restraint and its foreshadowing of Elfman highs to come.
A high-theatre curtain-raiser of tremendous vim, ‘Main Titles (Beetlejuice)’ sets the hyperactive
pitch gloriously. After Harry Belafonte’s vocal cameo, galloping pianos, ghostly voices, whooshing strings, clamouring clarinets and thrusting rhythms jostle with an anything-goes vigour. It really shouldn’t hold together, but it does, thanks to the force of Elfman’s invention and sly structural know-how.
With Betelgeuse’s frenetic theme established, Elfman sustains a flair for character themes in mock-jaunty down-home parodies (for the Maitlands) and gothic waltzes
(for Lydia). From here, the afterlife dominates as Elfman’s score swerves every which way, lurching from church to fairground at the click of a castanet. Strings and harps swoop; woodwinds circle; organs boom; percussive jitters nibble at the score’s fringes. ‘In The Model’ evokes key Elfman influence Bernard Herrmann possessed by a punk spirit; ‘Juno’s Theme’, meanwhile, pre-empts Elfman’s Gotham City symphonies.
As the disparate parts merge on ‘The Incantation’, Elfman syncs his sonic chaos to Burton’s madcap narrative with a sure sense of intuition. A little showtime thus earned, Elfman’s score resembles a poltergeist lobbing sonic furniture around for the multiple climaxes. Fairground music and calliope chaos bustle restlessly, before reprisals of the core character themes remind us of the guiding hand steering the shape-shifting lunacy.
Along the way, Belafonte’s ‘Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)’ and ‘Jump In Line (Shake, Shake Señora)’ provide deliciously random calypso digressions. Much to Belafonte’s delight, ‘Day-O’ even re-charted thanks to Beetlejuice. “I’ll be around for a while,” the singer noted. Likewise, Burton and Elfman were here to stay. Kevin Harley