‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ VFX Supe Angus Bickerton Details the Sequel’s Spooktacular Effects

This article was written for the December '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 345).

Tim Burton’s long-anticipated sequel to his rollicking 1988 spookfest Beetlejuice has been one of the sweet box-office success stories of the year. The movie, which unites Michael Keaton as the crude, mischievous demon with Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), her stepmom Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and a new family member, Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), has grossed over $442 million worldwide (as of November 1) and doesn’t show any signs of slowing down this fall.

Having worked as a motion cameraman on Batman and a production visual effects supervisor on Dark Shadows, the film’s visual effects supervisor Angus Bickerton got an opportunity to collaborate with Burton again on the digital augmentation for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, where the mandate was to use and emulate the same techniques used for Beetlejuice (1988).

“That was intentional all the way through the shoot,” explains Bickerton, whose long list of credits also includes House of the Dragon, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The King’s Man. “I dug up my old Cinefex and read what was done in the original movie, so I had some idea of that they had done. I went with the same instincts: If we could do it in a practical way, we would do it in a practical way. Tim wanted to get back to that feeling.”

A Menagerie of Magical Effects

To achieve the desired visual aesthetic, a mixture of techniques was implemented, including stop-motion animation (courtesy of Mackinnon & Saunders), prosthetic makeup and animatronics (via creatures effects creative supervisor Neal Scanlan), miniatures made by Mattes & Miniatures and 1,200 visual effects shots touched by Framestore, One of Us, BUF, Red VFX and Goldcrest VFX.

“There is a running gag that Wolf Jackson [Willem Dafoe], the detective, is always being handed a cup of hot coffee,” explains Bickerton. “We added the steam onto those cups of hot coffee. But the way we approached that was a combination of CG steam and elements that I shot in my kitchen. It just gets in the way of the cooking!”

A sleight of hand was achieved with editing when Beetlejuice stitches shut Lydia Deetz’s mouth. “That was a clever idea,” he says “It’s literally a cut. Winona had a prosthetic mouthpiece which she could clamp between her teeth that matched her flesh and already had the stitches in there; she could pretend the action of being hit, put it in her mouth and do it again, and we would jump-cut the two together. We only had to do the tiniest bits of touch-up around the prosthetic.”

In the film, the death of Charles Deetz is depicted through stop-motion animation. “The exterior of the plane was CG, but we modeled it to look like a miniature,” says Bickerton. “The clouds were cotton wool clouds that I shot on a piece of glass, which I had great fun doing, while the water was CG but simulated as if we had done it with plastic sheeting. The character of Charles Deetz was stop motion and the wing that he was on was a miniature wing. I went out and bought a radio control kit of an airliner, which was about 1/12th scale, and extracted the wing from that. I worked with a company called Mattes & Miniatures, and we basically did a mini-pyro shoot for the explosion because, as Tim put it, he wanted to make those shots feel like Thunderbirds.”

‘What’s great about Beetlejuice is it’s pure cinema. The sandworm really physically doesn’t fit in the church, but if you know how to cut it together you can make it feasible and get away with it.’

— Production VFX supervisor Angus Bickerton

Of course, the movie required Beetlejuice to spin his head around 360 degrees. “The head spin became part of the finale, and Tim came up with the idea fairly late,” recalls Bickerton. “It is a difficult one to do because everyone thinks about The Exorcist. But actually, when you watch The Exorcist, it is done in three or four different cuts. With Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it was much harder. We didn’t cut away, and he had to do a full 360. It is practical. We’re having to do little warps to the costume to make it feel like his body is transforming underneath. We didn’t want his neck to corkscrew, so it’s a total cheat how his neck rotates within his costume collar. There is a little bit of CG work at the collar line to help that blend. On the top of his head is just blue screen.”

Another late addition was the “influencer sequence” in which people get sucked into their smartphones. “We were toying with whether we should make it look like a sculpted plastic, because that’s what they did in the original film,” says Bickerton. “But ultimately, we went for a half and half, aiming to be photoreal but having some of that staccato animation of the original stop motion.”

Then there is the unforgettable scene where Beetlejuice’s ex-wife, Delores (Monica Bellucci), staples her face back together again. “Monica was made up with the staples, so we would do a clean and reveal, or you paint them out and reveal them on as she’s stapling; she would go through the motions, but it would all be there,” recalls the VFX supe. “Occasionally, they weren’t there, and we had to track them on. We would have a few discreet markers on her face, but it was all quite low-tech.”

As for the wonderful Shrinkers, which have shrunken heads, minimal CG was required. “You’ve got to credit Tim for this. From Day 1, there was this idea that there would be this group of Shrinkers,” says Bickerton. “Tim said, ‘We’re going to do it entirely practically.’ And we all went, ‘Are you sure you won’t need to augment or put a warp on an eyebrow or get a more extreme look of shock in their faces?’ ‘Nope. We’re not going to do any of that.’ Then, we thought that, physically, they might not be able to run around very well. He said, ‘No. They’ll be performers with raised shoulders and animatronic heads sitting on top of them.’ The only thing we did was to add some CG sweat to Bob’s brow in one shot.”

Maximum Miniatures Impact

One of the original movie accessories that was re-created for the sequel was the miniature of Winter River, Vermont, from which Beetlejuice reemerges.

“The scale of the model town is 1/58th, so it is tiny,” says Bickerton. “A model building is only four or five inches tall. In the original, in order to get some of the shots they built sized-up sections to get some close-ups of it. We didn’t do that. We pulled out of storage a mirror periscope rig that was designed and built to shoot Thomas the Tank Engine miniatures. Instead of having a lens at the end of the periscope you have a tiny tilting mirror, which means you can get within a millimeter of a model. The models were built into six sections so we could therefore pull them apart; it was cut right down the middle of the main street. We augmented the splitting with CG, which was done by Framestore.”

An effect called the “Fall filter” was applied to real locations to make shots seasonally correct and consistent. “Our first shoot was in July with the absolutely beautiful verdant Vermont landscape; that was color-shifting the greens to the autumn hues,” explains Bickerton. “And then we actually went back and did an additional shoot for another few days much later, getting toward the end of autumn where the trees were barer. It’s actually harder to add leaves onto bare trees than it is to color-shift trees in full bloom.”

“What’s great about Beetlejuice is it’s pure cinema,” he concludes. “The sandworm really physically doesn’t fit in the church, but if you know how to cut it together you can make it feasible and get away with it. This madcap universe allows you to mix and match your methodologies to do whatever it takes to create the story.”

Warner Bros.’ Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is playing in theaters worldwide. It is the seventh highest-grossing movie of 2024 at the U.S. box office (as of Nov. 1).