25 reasons why we still love Beetlejuice

Screenshot of official Beetlejuice trailer on warnerbros.com.

7. Otho

As Delia’s designer friend, Otho is one of the funnier characters in the film and certainly has some of the best lines, with such hard gems like, “She’s still upset because someone dropped a house on her sister.”

He’s as snobby as Delia about the condition of the house when the Deetzes move in, but more dry in his delivery. “Deliver me from L.L. Bean,” he says as he walks around the home. Then, when he sees Barbara and Adam’s wedding clothes in the closet, he turns to Delia and says, “Ozzie and Harriet.”

Otho is Delia’s main support throughout the movie, on her side in her insistence that the house needs a facelift and her partner in spray-painting weird things on the walls to modernize it. Yet he also has an intelligence and perhaps extrasensory perception that the Deetz family does not possess, with the exception of Lydia’s gift at seeing the dead.

“I have a feeling there’s something very interesting behind this door,” Otho says when they’re unable to open the attic where Barbara and Adam are hiding. This makes him the very first character to sense their presence. Later he mentions he was a paranormal investigator in New York. “I know just as much about the supernatural as I know about interior design,” he tells the dinner table.