Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

The recent teaser trailer for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has been garnering a lot of YouTube attention. It’s a simple trailer with three scenes and some slow-moving music. But wow does it ever pack in a lot of visual and musical nostalgia from _Beetlejuice _- that creepy 1988 fantasy-comedy classic. In case you haven’t seen Beetlejuice, the film’s title character (Michael Keaton) is a ghoulish “bio-exorcist” who emerges from a model village in the attic of a couple named Barbara and Adam.

One of the most memorable moments from the 1988 Beetlejuice is a dinner scene where the Deetz family and their guests, possessed by the ghosts of Barbara and Adam, are made to sing and dance Harry Belafonte’s 1956 calypso classic song “Day-O.”

The Beetlejuice Beetlejuice teaser trailer opens with a chrome-coloured Warner Bros. Pictures logo animation, accompanied by swelling octaves from orchestral strings and whistling industrial risers, not unlike the cliché single piano note at the beginning of trailers from the recent past. These sounds build, then disappear. Abruptly, at 0:06, as we pan over the small town of Winter River (which looks like it hasn’t changed much since the first film) a solo voice–possibly a teenager–begins a slow and contemplative rendition of the first phrase of “Day-O.”

“Day-O” is back! (Even as we bid Belafonte a fond farewell last year.) The end of each vocal phrase here stretches on with a long reverb tail as though sung in a cavernous space.

At 0:08 on screen we are introduced to Astrid, daughter of Lydia (Winona Ryder). At 0:13 Astrid bikes past the red covered bridge where Barbara and Adam had their fatal car accident in the first film. This leads to another riser, and an accented reverberant chord from the metallic percussion at 0:15, synched with the intertitle “From the Mind of Tim Burton.” The use of tuned percussion for this accent feels like a nod to the creative scoring of Burton’s long-time go-to composer, Danny Elfman, while the backlit black serif font titles echo the design of the original Beetlejuice opening credits.

At 0:17 we cut to a shot of a casket at a burial, as a children’s choir completes the first phrase of “Day O.” 0:26 brings a cut to the staircase to the attic from the original film. Astid ascends as the solo voice sings “Come Mr. Tally Man, tally me banana.” Now the voice has orchestral harmonies ringing in the background. In a clever but subtle audio-visual alignment, the children’s choir re-enters at 0:30 for the line “Daylight come…” which is synched to the moment when Astrid turns on the attic lighting, built to resemble dozens of stars. But at 0:34, as Astrid pulls a dust cover off the model town, the choir disappears, replaced again by ominous industrial risers.

The risers disappear again at 0:37 to make space for one of the most rhythmically interesting lines of “Day-O.” When Belafonte would sing this song, he would get to a part in choruses where he would repeat the words “me say day” over and over while descending the scale, as though the vocals were becoming unhinged from the song’s tempo (check out 1:40 and 2:34 in this recording of Belafonte to hear what I mean). As the solo voice sings “me say day” over and over, the lighting over the model village evokes lightning, and a chasm opens along the centre of the model, cinematic earthquake-style. The sound design here includes much thunder, rumbling, distant shouts and screams, accompanied by orchestral instruments playing wild ascending glissandi.

Beetlejuice rises out of the chasm, to Lydia’s horror, as the choir sings “Daylight come and me want to go…” at 0:48. You might not have noticed, but there has been no spoken dialogue in this entire teaser trailer. All the sonic space up until now has been given to the song and the sound design. This makes Beetlejuice's line at 0:55, “The juice is loose,” all the more impactful.

Over an animated title card at the end of the teaser, the choir hits a nice chord on the final word “home.” We close out with four final notes on metallic percussion, synched to align again with release date and production team names in the same intertitle style.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice busts into theatres September 6th.

— Jack Hui Litster