25 reasons why we still love Beetlejuice

Screenshot of official Beetlejuice trailer on warnerbros.com.

25. Alec Baldwin as Adam Maitland

If being a ghost meant being stuck in a house, dead or alive, with a deceased couple, you probably couldn’t do any better than Adam and Barbara Maitland. The main characters in Beetlejuice, they’re clean-cut, attractive, and kind—the type of people who wave at their neighbors. They’re also the type that would unfortunately court death rather than hit a dog on a bridge, and this goodness ultimately leads to their early demise.

When we first meet the couple in their small New England town, they want nothing more than to spend their vacation at home with each other, Adam working on the model set of the town he’s created in the attic and his wife Barbara trying to avoid the meddlings of their relative Jane, who’s determined to sell their house out from under them.

Adam in particular, played by Alec Baldwin, is the kind of man you’d want haunting your place and helping you with your math homework. At the beginning of the movie, Adam gently scoops and places an ugly spider outside when he sees it—a great device showing the movie’s coming creepiness as well as his character’s decency. (I would’ve stomped that sucker.) Adam even has the requisite nice guy quirks that only make him more charming. “You had a photo of Bigfoot,” Barbara reminds in a later scene.