Yahoo News A Peek Into the Real Life 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' Filming Locations
The Beetlejuice sequel, appropriately named Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, hit screens this weekend, 36 years after the original was released. Directed once again by Tim Burton, with set design by Mark Scruton, the duo brought back the beloved nostalgic haunts that littered the classic ’80s film with fabulous flair.
While a few new sets were built, Burton and Scruton were intent on making this sequel feel like a continuation of the first movie rather than a reboot or a reimagining. “This film had to feel as though it belonged in the same world that had been created in the 1980s,” Scruton tells ELLE DECOR. “The challenge lay in recapturing the handmade, in-camera magic that made the original so special, while resisting the temptation to rely too heavily on modern visual effects.”
Much of the movie was shot in the Vermont town of East Corinth (the same as the original film), standing in as the fictional town of Winter River, Connecticut. “To recreate Winter River, I traveled back to the original location in Vermont to see if it still existed and if it was even viable to return,” shares Scruton. “It was clear the town had hardly changed, and the residents were more than happy to hear of the film’s potential return.” The Deetz family house, now 36 years worse for wear, was recreated on the same hill it was set in the original film.
Scruton and his team spent 12 weeks building the house, using a few fragile prints of some of the original drawings as a reference point. “The rest we pieced together from watching the film and from photos taken at the time,” says Scruton. “Then our set dressers spent two weeks artfully draping the mourning shroud,” a piece of cloth covering the building’s body linked to a funeral scene that is teased in the trailer.
As for the film’s outside shots in the town, the crew filmed on East Corinth’s main street, which features the original buildings seen in the 1988 film—that is, most of them. “The Maitlands’ hardware store was so dilapidated and unsafe that we had to build a replica of it around it,” Scruton adds. One of the older buildings used in the film was a Masonic lodge, also in East Corinth, which Scruton and his team renovated for one quick shot of Astrid, played by Jenna Ortega, on her bike.
The interiors of Astrid’s boarding school were filmed across the pond at the Temple Dinsley estate—formerly known as Princess Helena College before it closed down in 2022—in Hitchin, England. “Now abandoned, we had to undertake significant work to bring the building up to scratch so it looked like a high end New England boarding school,” shares Scruton. This included manicuring the extensive surrounding lawns and grounds and introducing several of Delia Deetz’s (Catherine O’Hara) sculptural pieces and the postmodern exterior of the Deetz Arts Center to, as Scruton puts it, “add a jarring clash of styles.”
Back in East Corinth, the iconic red covered bridge where the Maitlands met their untimely demise had to be rebuilt, as it had been replaced by a two-lane highway. Melrose, a suburb of Boston, was the only other location used for Winter River. Of the other sets, most were filmed abroad: The West Wycombe estate in Buckinghamshire, England, was a stand-in for a New England church and graveyard; scenes set in Bran Castle, Romania, were shot in the Hell Fire Caves, also in Buckinghamshire; and all the interiors were shot at Warner Brothers Studios in Leavesden, England.
The postmodern splendor of the Deetzes’ original house was kept alive via in-depth research in the Warner Bros. archives and beyond. “We had access to original drawings from the Warner Bros. archives to help build the legacy sets,” shares Scruton, adding that he also drew inspiration from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, German and Russian Expressionist cinema and artwork like F.W. Murnau’s Faust and the work of other set designers like Andrej Andrejew and William Cameron Menzies, and artists Richard Tennant Cooper and Natalia Goncharova.
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