The Tim Burton ending inspired by Brian De Palma: “It was in the spirit of the movie”
When it comes to directors with their own imitable style, few stand out more than Tim Burton. The British filmmaker and King of the Goths has multiple tells when making a movie; from an alienated main character with some sort of physical difference to the contrast between suburban mundanity and the fantastical to regular collaborators like Johnny Depp and his ex-partner Helena Bonham Carter.
Burton’s films have greatly impacted cinema over the past four decades and have influenced millions, even if just a teenager with a Corpse Bride poster on their wall. But who inspires the inspirer? With regards to his most recent film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, another acclaimed director played a big role in how it all ended.
The final scenes of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice are wild, even by Burton’s standards. It ends with Jenna Ortega’s Astrid giving birth, only for the baby to come out looking exactly like Michael Keaton’s title character. It seems like a total non-sequitur, weird for the sake of weird, but, as Burton explained to Collider, there is a method to the madness. “I love Brian de Palma,” he revealed. “And it’s kind of a Brian de Palma ending where it’s real, but it’s not real. Because the emotion was beautiful, like Lydia talking about life and connecting with real people. So, I just felt like it was in the spirit of the movie to kind of mix it up a little bit.”
De Palma, a leading light of the New Hollywood movement in the 1970s and 80s, is known for his shock endings. His adaptation of Stephen King’s Carrie ends with a girl being pulled underground by the deceased title character, only to wake up and find out it was all a dream. Perhaps his biggest swerve is the ending of 1981’s Blow Out, which stars John Travolta as a sound engineer who accidentally records something he shouldn’t. We won’t spoil the twist here, but it’s a whopper.
With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Burton doesn’t even attempt to hide his affection for De Palma’s earlier work. The music that plays over the sequence where Astrid falls in love, gets married, and eventually has her baby is ripped straight from the Carrie soundtrack. After Astrid gives birth, her mother Lydia (Winona Ryder) wakes up from a dream, an exact mirror of how Amy Irving’s Sue Snell brought Carrie to a close 48 years earlier.
Screenwriters Alfred Gough and Mark Millar sat down with The Hollywood Reporter to shed more light on the film’s insane climax. “We didn’t want the movie to feel like it got wrapped up in a bow, so we had the idea with Tim of Lydia giving up on her show and she and Astrid go off on this trip that she was going to take with her dad,” said Gough. “It was Tim’s idea to do this sequence and make it looks [sic] like she gets married and everything is going great – and then she has this Betelgeuse baby and you realize it’s a dream. It was the end-of-the-movie curveball, so you realize nothing in the [sic] this world ever gets wrapped up in a bow.”
Love the ending of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or hate it, it’s amazing that De Palma’s work is still being referenced in 2024. The once-prominent director’s career has faded significantly in recent years, but his influence on cinema cannot be understated. As long as filmmakers like Burton continue to acknowledge his genius, then De Palma’s legacy will never truly be lost.
