Petar Agbaba
A dead man who has not aged in 36 years presents a strange problem for a makeup department. The audience must recognise him instantly, yet the design cant feel like a museum display of something created decades earlier. He has to look unchanged and newly alive at the same time. That contradiction sits at the centre of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Tim Burton’s 2024 sequel to his 1988 supernatural comedy. The film returns to a world defined by wonky sets, visible seams, theatrical colour, rubbery creatures, exaggerated bodies, and characters who refuse to behave according to natural laws. Its practical makeup does more than recreate the pleasures of the original film; it gives the sequel a physical language of its own.
Through my work across film, television, and theatre, and in my role as Director of the Christine Blundell Make-up Academy, I have seen how the strongest makeup designs emerge from more than technical skill alone. Successful designs come from understanding performance, character, collaboration, camera requirements, and the emotional language of a film. The most memorable makeup is not always the most elaborate or technically polished. It is the design that gives an actor something meaningful to inhabit and gives the audience information before the character has even spoken.
By that measure, the hair and makeup work led by Christine Blundell, working closely with Neal Scanlan’s creature-effects team, is one of the film’s greatest strengths. The work is detailed without becoming precious, expressive without overwhelming the performances, and knowingly artificial without losing its emotional or comic impact. In Burton’s afterlife, that balance is particularly important because the audience must believe in the characters while simultaneously enjoying the obvious strangeness of how they have been constructed.
Returning to a Handmade Afterlife
The original Beetlejuice remains memorable because its afterlife never looks sleek or over-engineered. It feels assembled from painted surfaces, puppetry, prosthetics, stop-motion animation, exaggerated costumes, and objects that seem to have escaped from an eccentric theatre workshop. That handmade quality suits a universe governed by unreliable bureaucracy, strange rules, and dead people who often look as though they were reconstructed according to an imperfect memory of human anatomy. The visible artifice is not a flaw in Burton’s world; it is part of the comedy and part of the film’s personality.
A modern sequel could easily have cleaned away that instability, replacing physical awkwardness with smoother digital imagery. Instead, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice preserves the friction between the recognisably human and the deliberately fabricated. The joke often lives in our awareness that a head is too small, a wound is too theatrical, a colour is too strong, or a dead person has been assembled with more imagination than anatomical knowledge. Burton understands that physical effects contribute texture, weight, limitation, and surprise, qualities that remain valuable even in a production where digital tools are available.
That physical presence also changes the actors’ relationship with the work. They are not simply performing beside an abstract concept of decay that will be completed later; they can wear it, touch it, react to it, and allow it to influence how they move. A prosthetic appliance can change posture, false teeth can alter speech, a wig can influence silhouette, and a heavy makeup application can encourage an actor to hold the face differently. Practical makeup remains especially powerful when filmmakers understand that the material itself can become part of the performance.
Beetlejuice and the Difficulty of Staying the Same
Michael Keaton’s Beetlejuice represents the film’s most delicate continuity challenge. Lydia, Delia, and the human world have aged, but Beetlejuice cannot appear to have followed the same biological rules. He belongs to the afterlife, where ordinary time has no authority, so the audience needs to recognise the familiar 1988 character almost immediately. At the same time, the makeup must survive contemporary cameras, close scrutiny, and the reality that the actor beneath it is more than three decades older.
Blundell’s team used a body double to test the makeup before Keaton arrived, allowing Burton to review the design and suggest adjustments while the production refined the character’s return. Keaton, who had been closely involved in creating the original appearance, then helped fine-tune the result once he entered the process. The aim was not to redesign Beetlejuice for a new generation but to give the familiar face slightly more dimension while protecting the visual memory audiences already carried with them. That distinction is crucial because too much improvement could have made him feel less authentic than a deliberately imperfect recreation.
The final makeup preserves the broken nose, stained teeth, pale yellow-white complexion, darkened eyes, chaotic hair, and general sense of decay associated with the character, while introducing subtle changes that help the design hold up on modern screens. The grime is heavier, decomposition is richer, and more moss appears through the hair, giving the character additional texture without turning him into a different version of himself. Christine Blundell also prepared three variations of his teeth, while a small mask made with Scanlan’s team supported the moment when his eyes bulge dramatically from his face. These are small modifications, but together they protect continuity while giving the sequel enough detail to feel physically present.
Just as important is the practicality of the application itself. The completed Beetlejuice makeup could be applied in roughly 35 minutes, which reflects the level of organisation required when a major character has to be recreated consistently over a demanding shoot. A successful film makeup must not only look good in one photograph; it must survive early call times, long days, physical performance, repeated takes, close cameras, and scenes filmed out of narrative order. Even the problem of Keaton’s naturally pink tongue became part of that practical thinking. When it looked too healthy for the afterlife, the makeup team used a blue food-dye mixture to darken it, a wonderfully simple solution that captures the instinct behind good practical work: identify what breaks the illusion, solve it efficiently, and keep the production moving.
Lydia’s Fringe Is a Form of Memory
The most revealing hair design in the film may belong to Winona Ryder’s Lydia Deetz. Her appearance has to answer the same question that the story asks about her character: how much of the strange, self-possessed teenager from 1988 still exists inside this anxious adult? Lydia cannot simply wear an updated version of her old hairstyle because that would reduce continuity to imitation. Her design needs to show that she remembers the person she once was while also revealing that adulthood, grief, work, and motherhood have altered the way she carries that identity.
Blundell prepared different wigs, fringes, and makeup possibilities before Ryder began work, with Lydia eventually receiving two related hair and makeup looks. On her paranormal television programme, her hair becomes sharper, more gelled, and more deliberately reminiscent of the silhouette associated with the original film. Away from the cameras, the fringe softens and the makeup appears more worn than perfected, as though Lydia has moved through an exhausting day without stopping to repair the image she presents to the world. The difference is subtle, but subtlety is exactly what makes the design psychologically useful.
On television, Lydia is effectively performing “Lydia Deetz.” The pointed fringe functions almost like a logo, a familiar piece of gothic authenticity that can be presented to an audience and instantly understood. In private, that shape loosens, allowing the person beneath the persona to appear less certain and more vulnerable. Her hair remembers who she was even when Lydia herself seems unsure about what that identity now means, turning continuity into an emotional rather than merely visual device.
From a professional perspective, this is one of the places where hair and makeup become especially powerful. A major prosthetic transformation announces itself immediately, but a slight change in texture, shape, placement, or finish can communicate a shift in control without drawing attention away from the performance. Lydia’s design suggests that she has neither abandoned nor fully escaped her past. She has commercialised part of it, depended on it, and perhaps become trapped inside the very image that once allowed her to express herself.
Astrid’s Restraint Creates a Visual Counterpoint
Jenna Ortega’s Astrid provides the necessary visual counterpoint to Lydia. Rather than giving the younger character a second-generation version of her mother’s established gothic language, the design deliberately keeps her at a distance from it. Her visible makeup is restrained, her hair looks relatively natural, and the styling avoids a fringe that could too easily recall either Lydia or Ortega’s own appearance as Wednesday Addams. Those choices help Astrid exist as an individual rather than as a visual quotation from another Burton-associated character.
The restraint also strengthens the family dynamic because Astrid’s rejection of her mother becomes visible before she explains it in dialogue. She does not need to announce that she wants distance from Lydia’s world when the absence of Lydia’s visual codes already communicates that separation. Hair and makeup therefore become part of the generational conflict, establishing two different relationships with identity inside the same family. Lydia is partly trapped by an image she has carried for decades, whereas Astrid protects herself by refusing to inherit that image automatically.
Delia’s Red Hair Refuses to Behave
Catherine O’Hara’s Delia has never been a character who enters a room quietly, and in the sequel her hair carries much of that expressive force. Blundell initially had six wigs created in a lighter copper shade, but once O’Hara arrived, the direction moved towards a significantly more intense red. The remaining wigs were recoloured and cut to support the stronger choice, demonstrating how a design can continue evolving once the performer begins interacting with it. Rather than treating the original concept as untouchable, the team allowed the character to become clearer through collaboration.
O’Hara wanted Delia’s appearance to reflect a woman who had become even more artistic and unrestrained with age. Against Burton’s dark sets and the largely black visual world surrounding Lydia, the saturated red creates immediate separation, movement, and comic energy. A wig in a film like this is therefore much more than a hairstyle; it affects silhouette, rhythm, reaction shots, and the way an actor’s head moves through a scene. Delia’s hair almost seems to possess the same refusal to settle that defines the character herself.
The colour also performs useful narrative work when the three Deetz women appear together. Lydia is dominated by black, shadow, memory, and a sense of fading control, while Astrid avoids overt stylisation and resists inherited visual codes. Delia, by contrast, burns through the frame with deliberate excess. The three women belong to the same family, but their hair and makeup reveal three different relationships with performance: Lydia is constrained by an image, Astrid resists one, and Delia continues to create herself at maximum volume.
Delores: Beauty Held Together by Staples
Monica Bellucci’s Delores offers the film’s clearest fusion of beauty makeup, hair design, prosthetics, costume, and creature effects. Her first major sequence shows her reassembling a divided body and fastening herself back together, creating an image that is simultaneously funny, grotesque, glamorous, and threatening. Burton began with a sketch of the completed character, after which the design teams worked backwards to determine how that final body could be separated and then reconstructed on screen. That reverse-engineering process matters because every stage of destruction has to remain visually connected to the elegant finished figure.
Blundell worked closely with Scanlan’s workshop during development, using a body double while the departments tested the relationship between prosthetic sections, hair, makeup, and visible joins. An earlier concept involving an enormous electrified wig was eventually abandoned because it pushed the character too far into broad comedy. The final direction aimed for something entertaining but still unsettling, which is a difficult tonal line to maintain in a Burton film. Delores cannot become merely grotesque because her danger depends partly on her magnetism, yet she cannot remain conventionally glamorous because the audience must believe she has violently forced a destroyed body back into service.
The final design preserves Bellucci’s beauty while making that beauty unstable. Smudged cosmetics, long dark hair, sharply defined staple lines, and the visible evidence of bodily reconstruction create a woman who seems simultaneously composed and on the verge of coming apart. Her appearance is therefore not simply makeup placed over the character; it expresses the character’s defining action. Delores is maintaining control through force, literally holding herself together while pursuing the power she believes she is owed.
Practical construction gives the sequence much of its pleasure because the audience can understand the physical logic of what it is seeing. Surfaces meet, seams travel across recognisable parts of the body, and the staples have enough scale and direction to make the visual joke readable. Bellucci can also perform with an awareness of where those joins exist, allowing the construction to influence how the character occupies space. The design succeeds not because it attempts perfect anatomical realism, but because it is materially specific enough to make its impossible idea feel coherent.
Wolf Jackson and the Value of Looking Fake
Willem Dafoe’s Wolf Jackson demonstrates another important principle of character makeup: realism is not always the correct measure of success. Jackson is a dead actor playing a detective, and his damaged head was designed to look deliberately crude, theatrical, and somewhat old-fashioned. Burton supplied sketches, while Blundell and Scanlan’s teams divided responsibilities between prosthetic construction, the undamaged section of the face, hair, fake tan, colour work, and the concealment or presentation of joins. Dafoe also contributed the idea that the character should evoke the confident leading-man style of Hawaii Five-O, giving the visual design a recognisable performance tradition to play against.
The visible artificiality works because Jackson himself is performing authority rather than naturally possessing it. He is an actor continuing to act after death, so the slightly theatrical prosthetic becomes part of the joke rather than something the audience needs to ignore. A completely invisible or hyper-realistic wound might have been more technically seamless, but it would have said less about who this man was and how he still understands himself. The design succeeds because its artificiality has dramatic meaning.
Makeup artists are often trained to hide evidence of their labour. Edges should disappear, lace should vanish, colour should appear to belong naturally to the skin, and appliances should ideally become invisible under the camera. Burton’s world frequently asks for the opposite result. The craft still needs to be controlled, but the finished design may need to retain handmade awkwardness, theatrical exaggeration, or even a hint of cheap showbusiness. Jackson’s open head works precisely because it seems to have been designed by a universe in which death, bureaucracy, acting, and low-budget spectacle have all merged together.
An Afterlife Built by Departments Working Together
The film’s crowded afterlife also demonstrates why practical filmmaking depends on collaboration rather than strict departmental ownership. Blundell has explained that Scanlan’s creature-effects team could not create every dead character through extensive prosthetic construction, so the makeup department handled many effects directly from the kit while performers moved between departments when a design required swollen heads, exposed brains, larger appliances, or more complicated creature work. The two teams overlapped on roughly 30 percent of the work, with responsibility shifting according to what each character actually needed. That flexibility is one reason the background population feels so varied rather than mass-produced.
A half-decayed background ghost does not require the same process as Delores, and the production benefits from recognising that difference. Some characters can be established through carefully chosen skin colour, hair texture, one exaggerated injury, or a small number of physical details, while featured performers may require several stages of prosthetic construction and extensive testing. Variation in method produces variation in appearance, which prevents the afterlife from feeling as though every dead person emerged from the same design template. The world becomes believable because the craft remains responsive to character hierarchy, screen time, movement, and storytelling needs.
The Soul Train sequence extends that principle into choreography. The dancers required dead, disco-inflected designs that depended on costume, hair, and makeup working as a single moving image rather than as separate departments. Their wigs had to be secured strongly enough to survive professional dance movement, because a visually perfect fitting becomes useless if it cannot withstand the physical demands of the scene. The design therefore has to perform the choreography as reliably as the dancer wearing it.
Practical Makeup Is Not the Enemy of CGI
It is tempting to describe films such as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as victories for practical effects over CGI, but that argument is too simple. Digital effects can extend sets, remove supports, combine physical layers, refine movement, and complete images that would be unsafe, impractical, or impossible to achieve entirely in camera. The more useful question is not whether digital tools are involved, but where the image begins and what kind of information the actor and camera receive during production. When a scene begins with a physical makeup, appliance, wig, costume, puppet, or built element, the performance already has something tangible to respond to.
Light falls across real texture differently from the way an actor imagines a surface that will later be created. A performer wearing an appliance feels its weight and restriction, which can lead to discoveries in posture and movement that might never have emerged from a purely theoretical design. Other actors can react to a shared physical object, and the cinematographer can compose around something that already occupies real space. Digital work can then refine or extend an image whose dramatic foundation was established on set.
This approach also protects the human irregularity that Burton’s films often need. A perfectly symmetrical digital wound may be technically impressive, while a hand-finished wound with a slightly strange edge may be funnier, sadder, or more memorable because it carries the trace of physical construction. The goal is not technical purity or an ideological preference for one method over another. The goal is a character, and the most effective technique is the one that best supports that character.
The Makeup Chair as a Creative Meeting Place
One reason the film’s designs feel performed rather than imposed is that the actors helped shape them. Keaton refined the familiar details of Beetlejuice, Ryder participated in determining how Lydia’s original silhouette would survive into adulthood, O’Hara encouraged Delia’s wigs towards a more extreme red, and Dafoe brought a specific television reference to Wolf Jackson. Burton also preferred making final decisions when performers were present, allowing character design to emerge through interaction instead of arriving as a completely fixed instruction. That process recognises that a makeup design is not truly finished until someone begins performing inside it.
The makeup chair is therefore much more than the place where an approved design is mechanically applied. It is often where a character becomes practical for the first time. An actor may discover that a fringe changes the angle of a gaze, a set of teeth alters speech, a prosthetic encourages a new posture, or a wig changes the rhythm of a comic reaction. The makeup artist observes those discoveries and adjusts accordingly, creating a feedback loop between technical design and performance.
At its best, the finished result becomes a shared construction that no single department or performer could have completed alone. That collaborative understanding is particularly important in a film where visual exaggeration could easily overwhelm character. The makeup has to be strange enough for Burton’s world while remaining flexible enough for the actor to make it emotionally or comically precise. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice repeatedly finds that balance.
Keeping the Craft Alive
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice does not keep practical makeup alive by preserving old techniques behind glass or reproducing the 1988 film without change. It allows the craft to remain messy, collaborative, funny, responsive, and closely connected to performance. Beetlejuice’s face demonstrates the discipline required to make an immortal character survive an actor’s natural ageing, while Lydia’s fringe transforms visual continuity into emotional storytelling. Delia’s red wigs make personality visible through colour and movement, Delores’s seams turn bodily reconstruction into a combination of glamour and threat, and Wolf Jackson’s deliberately old-fashioned wound proves that an effect can look artificial while still being completely right for the character.
These designs succeed because they do not ask the audience to admire technique in isolation. They create comic rhythm, reveal relationships between generations, shape the way performers move, and establish different visual realities for the living and the dead while keeping everyone inside the same cinematic world. The strongest makeup design is rarely the one that shouts most loudly about its complexity. It is the one whose technical choices become inseparable from the behaviour of the person wearing it.
Practical makeup will not survive modern cinema by competing with digital effects in a contest over which technique can produce the most convincing realism. It survives by doing what it has always done best: placing an idea directly onto a human body and allowing a performer to transform that physical idea into behaviour. In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the dead may be held together with staples, moss, wigs, food dye, appliances, exaggerated wounds, and carefully controlled colour. What finally brings those characters to life is the creative conversation between the materials and the people wearing them, and that remains something cinema should be reluctant to lose.
