After Tim Burton’s whimsical horror film Beetlejuice premiered in 1988, fans made many pilgrimages to the quiet Vermont town of East Corinth, which stood in as the fictional setting of Winter River. It was only fitting that the small town, which has a population of less than 1,500, got to reprise its role in the long-awaited sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, alongside Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder.
“No one knew what it would be like,” says production designer Marc Scruton, who previously collaborated with Burton on the Netflix series Wednesday. “No one had been back there since the first film, other than the fans. But when I flew there, you could tell it was pretty much unchanged. It was the same town it had always been, and you could see why they’d gone there in the first place.”
Scruton and his team spent 12 weeks in East Corinth rebuilding the Winter River sets, including the hilltop house owned by the Deetz family and the town’s main street. The interior sets, meanwhile, were created in London at Leavesden Studios. In total, Scruton and his team built 77 sets, most of which needed to take the film’s practical effects into consideration.
The film sees Ryder’s Lydia Deetz, her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) and her daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) returning to Winter River for a sudden funeral. Lydia’s presence reignites the interest of afterlife spirit Betelgeuse (Keaton) and plunges the family into a comedic, bizarre adventure between life and death. The story showcases even more of Burton’s fantastical universe from Beetlejuice, including clever expansions of the afterlife and Winter River’s graveyard.
“Every day was bonkers,” Scruton says. “And because everything was real, you just roamed around in this bananas world and it just made you smile. Everybody enjoyed the frivolous craziness of the whole thing.” Here, Scruton discusses returning to East Corinth, developing the film’s stylised afterlife, and the love of the fans.
