25 reasons why we still love Beetlejuice

Screenshot of official Beetlejuice trailer via warnerbros.com.

14. The Civil Servants

The waiting room for the dead in Beetlejuice is staffed by a cranky pink employee. As Delia’s designer friend Otho mentions later, there’s a rumor that people who commit suicide become civil servants after they’re dead, and this seems to hold true for this world.

“If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have had my little accident,” the woman at the information desk says to the Maitlands, showing her slit wrists. This receptionist has wings and hot pink hair, like she’d committed suicide while at a Halloween party. But she’s snappy and impatient, in her own personal bureaucratic hell in service to the dead.

“You just bought the big one two months ago and you already want help?” she incredulously asks Adam and Barbara, adding, “You’re going to use up all your health vouchers.” She crisply explains that they have to spend 125 years on earth, during which time they only receive three sessions with their case worker. You get the feeling she’s had to explain this to the recently deceased over and over again.

In presenting this view of hell as a bureaucratic nightmare, the film seems to hit at the neverending frustration, confusion, and dreariness of existence, which in Beetlejuice follows the characters past their graves.