10 Movies That Were Almost WAY Darker
6. Beetlejuice
Tim Burton's Beetlejuice is plenty damn dark as it is, but earlier drafts of the fantasy horror-comedy were positively unhinged.
Michael McDowell's original script was a lot less fun, that's for sure, with the Maitlands' (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) fatal car crash being shown in graphic detail, while Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) himself was depicted as a winged demon who wants to kill the Deetz family and have sex with Lydia (Winona Ryder).
Lydia would've also had a younger sister who was "mutilated" by Beetlejuice in the film's finale, because why the hell not?
In a 2018 interview, co-writer Larry Wilson also revealed that he and McDowell wrote another draft which ended with Lydia dying in a fire and joining the Maitlands in the afterlife, though this was nixed after the pair were asked whether they really wanted to give teens the message, "go die in a fire."
It's a testament to the power of drafting and drafting and drafting that the final version of Beetlejuice works as well as it does, because its original iteration would've surely been a commercial flop.