Beetlejuice 2 Reveals The Living Form Of The Bio-Exorcist And How He Died

WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Read at your own risk!

“Beetlejuice” gave audiences one of Michael Keaton’s funniest and best performances back in 1988. With less than 20 minutes of screentime (a limited window kept intact for the newly released sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice”), Keaton managed to become one of the most memorable characters of all time, an icon in both comedy and horror. The bio-exorcist and trickster demon, whose name is actually spelled Betelgeuse, is a scheming, mischievous, and occasionally menacing character obsessed with escaping the afterlife, and he’s also more than a little handsy and horny. That’s pretty much all we know about the character, and honestly, that’s all we really needed to know to understand his vibe in Tim Burton’s dark circus of twisted ghosts and Saturn sandworms. 

But now that Tim Burton is back behind the director’s chair for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” he took the time to fill in some of Betelgeuse’s backstory. In fact, “Beetlejuice 2” reveals one of the biggest mysteries surrounding the stripe-suited madman who refers to himself as the ghost with the most. Thanks to a classic Italian-cinema-styled flashback in the style of Mario Bava’s gothic horror film “Black Sunday” from 1960, complete with grainy black and white footage and subtitles translating Italian dialogue, the new film not only reveals how the ‘Juice died, but also reveals his original human form. 

Thanks to the homage to “Black Sunday,” which took place during the Black Plague, we can safely assume that Betelgeuse was living in the 1630s. As shown in the flashback, Betelgeuse was a poor grave robber, stealing items from the bodies of the many people dying from the plague. We get to see him without the pale skin, blackened eye sockets, and moldy flesh, though he still has that wild hair. While sneaking around the graveyard, he encounters Delores and it’s love at first sight. The two have a whirlwind romance, including a freaky bit of intimacy in the bedroom. Betelgeuse thinks he’s got his life cut out for him with this newfound love until she poisons him with what he thought was a celebratory glass of wine on their honeymoon.

It turns out that Delores was part of some mysterious death cult, and she only used Betelgeuse for some kind of human sacrifice. However, what we’re not shown is how Delores eventually died, which would have been interesting since she ended up cut up into several pieces and stored in individual crates somewhere in an afterlife office. When, how, and why did she become a soul sucker? We have no idea. But that’s not the only mystery still left to solve.

Even though Burton reveals a big piece of Betelgeuse’s origin story, we still don’t know how he came to be a bio-exorcist or trickster demon. He’s not like most of the dead people in the afterlife, so what brought him to this strange profession? Perhaps that’s something that can be answered in “Beetlejuice 3,” but since this sequel took 36 years to come together, I wouldn’t get my hopes up for that just yet.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is in theaters everywhere now.