Films: Beetlejuice (1987), Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)

Alias: Several, most notably Betelgeuse (Beetlejuice)

Type: Mystical

Location: Eldritch location/Civilized area

Height/Weight: That of average humans (most of the time).

Affiliation: Good (Everyone else), Evil (Betelgeuse)

Summary: Think there's nothing after you kick the bucket? Well, fear not, because all you got to do is get in line to see your ultimate fate, alongside all the others who died tragically (and weirdly). Just hope no one exorcises you, and pray to God that you don't enlist the world's only Bio-exorcist in the underworld...

History: Bad news is that newlyweds Barbara and Adam Maitland are dead. Good news is that they can still live at home for another 125 years. Trouble is that a stuck-up new family is coming in to wreck it. Now they have to haunt them out...with pitiful results. Desperate, they turn to a former assistant of the undead bureaucracy: the unhinged mad spirit Betelgeuse. Problem is, he has his own ways of haunting, and he's been waiting forever to enter the world of the living again...

Notable Kills: Personally drops an evil spirit into Hell via trap-door.

Final Fate: Betelgeuse attempts to marry the mortal teen Lydia Deetz in order to reign supreme in the mortal world, but Barbara turns the tables on him by riding a demon sandworm and having it eat him. As the Maitlands enjoy their afterlife, the mad bio-exorcist has to stay in the afterlife waiting room behind over nine trillion souls for his crimes...until thirty years later, when he's summoned again by Lydia in an act of desperation, leading to a whole new adventure that even involves the spirit of the soul-eating madwoman who took Betelgeuse's life in the first place (his ex-wife, no less). After all is said and done, he's banished to the afterlife again, though he still haunts Lydia every now and then.

Powers/Abilities: Shapeshifting, pure omnipotence in general.

Weakness: Exorcised folk end up in a Hellish limbo for all eternity. In Betelgeuse's case, saying his name three times fast sends him back if he's in the middle of business.

Scariness Factor: 3.5-Most of the afterlife services are fairly benign, if a little overworked, but Betelgeuse is hated by them all for a reason. Unreasonable and mindlessly self-indulgent, this guy brings a twisted sense of humor to his frankly self-serving services.

Trivia: -A sequel was planned long before the official one got off the ground, but with a title like "Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian", we're thankful it didn't happen.

-This film was so popular that it spawned an animated 1989 cartoon, with an alternate continuity featuring a (slightly) more benign Betelgeuse being friends with Lydia as opposed to trying to court her. Thank God too, because otherwise this show wouldn't get the cult following it had.