10 Horror Films That Actually Won Oscars

Won: Best Makeup:

If you didn’t know Tim Burton from his short films or Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, then Beetlejuice was the film that put him on the map and pointed the way forward in terms of visual style and manic invention.

In his two-star review, Roger Ebert dismissed the film for being “about gimmicks, not characters”, but he missed the point: like several of Burton’s later films, it’s a snapshot of a weird place presented through the eyes of shining innocents. What’s weirder than a manual for the recently deceased, an afterlife staffed by three-fingered typists and a wild-haired character named Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) who advertises “exorcisms of the living”?

Barely recognizable beneath heavy makeup, Keaton pulls out all the stops with a performance Bill Moseley claims was inspired by his turn as Chop Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. His character fits in perfectly with production design that’s somewhere between Chuck Jones and Salvador Dali, all bright colours, manic energy and bizarre, surrealist images.

Burton might’ve had more money on his Batman movies, but they somehow feel smaller when contrasted with Beetlejuice’s scope, which takes in our present, the afterlife and a desert landscape populated by sandworms.