Blue tongues and an exposed brain: How ‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ visual effects went back to basics

It was a typical day on the set of Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” and a dead mime was screaming.

The most unsettling problem? The actor‘s tongue still had a visible and decidedly not-ghostly shade of pink.

Christine Blundell and her hair and makeup team quickly got a blue food dye concoction for the actor to gargle and spit out so his tongue would go dark. It’s an example of the type of practical effects Burton leaned on for the 36-year sequel to his cult classic “Beetlejuice” — itself known for doing real illusions in front of the camera.

“There’s all these little things,” said Blundell, head of the department for hair and makeup on the Warner Bros. film. “It’s just working up the level of dead all the time.”

Lately, productions have increasingly promoted the number of so-called practical effects used in their films, particularly as audiences decry movies that rely heavily on noticeable computer-generated imagery.

Films such as Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus” and its physical face-huggers and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” with its extensive use of prosthetics, puppets and some stop-motion animation, are the latest to generate buzz about the use of practical effects. (Blundell said 85% to 90% of the hair and makeup department’s work was untouched by digital enhancements in the final version of the film.)

Audiences seem to be rewarding those efforts. “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” has succeeded at the box office with a worldwide gross of $153 million so far on a reported production budget of $100 million. Disney’s “Alien: Romulus” has scared up $314 million on a reported budget of $80 million.

Burton told Blundell in an initial meeting that he wanted the effects in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” to hew closely to the original film’s handmade style, and that whatever they could do “practical to camera, we will be doing practical to camera.” Many films these days are done at a brisk pace, and decisions to add effects, such as blood or a more ramped-up version of what was on camera, are often made in post-production edits.

“When a director says that sort of thing to you, you’re just like, ‘Wow, this is great. I can literally go back to when I didn’t have to rely on CGI mopping out wig laces and things like that,’” she said. “This was just stripped back to the bone, and it was just like, ‘OK, what we’re seeing here is what’s going to end up in the film.’”

Digital effects in films have existed for decades. Their true watershed moments came in 1991 with James Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” and in 1993 with Steven Spielberg‘s blockbuster “Jurassic Park.”

Though the films had a limited number of CGI shots, the effects — a liquid morphing into a robot and dinosaurs roaming the planet — showed the industry that such technology could appeal to audiences, even though the execution was still expensive and difficult to pull off, said Julie Turnock, professor of media and cinema studies at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“They were, to the industry, a kind of proof of concept that both aesthetically they can be successful, and also they could be marketed as an attraction: ‘Come see what the movies do now,’” she said.

In the early 2000s, blockbuster franchises such as “The Lord of the Rings” and “Harry Potter” showed studios that they could build storybook environments out of mostly digital technology, though enthusiasm was also tempered by widely panned effects in films such as “The Mummy Returns.”

“The whole thing with storytelling is trying to get the audience to suspend their disbelief and getting them to believe in the world you created,” said Daniel Leonard, professor and associate dean at Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts. “If they feel it’s fake, it takes them out of the story.”

In the last 15 years, technology improved and digital effects became more affordable, allowing major studios and lower-budget productions alike to rely on computerized movie magic. Most blockbuster films will have some amount of visual effects in every shot — and more often than not, it’s not obvious, Turnock said.

Often, physical effects can be a template onto which visual effects are projected. A production could film a puppet, for instance, but use CGI to enhance its facial expressions.

In “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Blundell said that she and animatronic and special makeup effects supervisor Neal Scanlan worked together to craft a quick mask with yellow-painted ping-pong balls to simulate Beetlejuice’s suddenly googly eyes when he looks at the sun.

Other effects were deliberately designed to be crude.

The exposed side brain of Willem Dafoe’s Wolf Jackson actor-detective character was intended to look like a heavy, early kind of prosthetic, a visual gag that plays off Dafoe’s dramatic and dated nature in the film.

Danny DeVito’s brief appearance as a dead janitor in the Afterlife involved green face paint, false teeth and colored contact lenses that prevented him from walking around on his own, Blundell said. Then Burton said he wanted DeVito’s janitor to dribble goo from his mouth. The team whipped up a mix of egg whites and other liquids.

“It’s the kinds of things that you would have done years ago,” she said.

As Richard, the deceased father of Jenna Ortega’s Astrid Deetz, Santiago Cabrera got a combination of prosthetics and makeup for the puppet piranha fish biting at his face, neck and body. After the puppeteer operated the piranhas in the shot, Blundell and her team would “run in and just make them look a little bit shiny.”

This level of detail for practical effects was necessary for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” she said.

“If we’d remade it and we’d relied on CGI, I think we’d all be ripped apart for it, especially Tim,” Blundell said. “I just honestly think that people wanted to see the nostalgia of the original ‘Beetlejuice,’ and they wanted to see the sand worm, and they wanted to see sort of crude makeup effects.”

Though audiences have rewarded productions that highlight their physical effects, the de-emphasis of digital effects in films’ marketing and promotion can have real-world, practical consequences for those artists. Many effects artists are not unionized and have difficult working conditions, including a lack of overtime pay, Turnock said.

“It impacts the clout that the effects companies have to bargain with the production entities,” she said. “If nobody values their work, if there’s not a sense that they’re valuable members of the team, then it’s hard for them to argue for better conditions.”