Charles Deetz's Death in 'Beetlejuice' Inspired by Tim Burton's Nightmare (Exclusive)

Warning: This article contains spoilers from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Charles Deetz, the patriarch of the Deetz family and a key figure from the original Beetlejuiceis no longer seen in the sequel, but definitely not forgotten.

Director Tim Burton made it widely known that Charles would not be alive during the events of the sequel. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. He notably wouldn't be played by Jeffrey Jones, who withdrew from public life after his first arrest in 2002 for possession of child pornography and registration as a sex offender after pleading guilty to soliciting a 14-year-old boy to pose for sexually explicit photographs. But the film, now in theaters, still has a place for the character.

Screenwriter Alfred Gough, who wrote the script with his long-time writing partner Miles Millar, tells Weekly entertainment that Charles' fate in the film was actually inspired by Burton's worst nightmare.

The whole premise of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice follows Charles' death, which prompts his wife Delia (Catherine O'Hara), daughter Lydia (Winona Ryder), and teenage granddaughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) to return to the fictional Connecticut town of Winter River, where the ghostly goings-on began. Delia is the one who must tell her stepdaughter how he died, and the audience sees the whole thing dramatized in a stop-motion animation sequence.

Charles was in a plane crash and just when he thought he had survived, a shark came along and bit him in half. In the new afterlife scenes, the ghost of the half-eaten, now headless Charles is portrayed by a double, brought to life with makeup and costume effects. The voice was added in post-production and Charles is not credited as an actor.

“The way Charles dies in this cartoon is Tim's nightmare of dying. He literally said, 'My nightmare is that I have a plane crash, survive the crash, almost drown and then get eaten by a shark,'” Gough tells EW. “We thought, 'Well, that's brilliant. So that's how he's going to die.'”

According to Gough, who worked with Burton and Millar on Netflix’s Wednesday The filmmaker wanted to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice to focus on the three characters Lydia, Delia and Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton). “Charles' death was the impetus for this,” says the author. “And what happens when Charles dies?” he adds. “Because as you know, when there are these moments of family crisis, I think everyone likes to think that a family gets stronger. That's not the case with a family. Whatever cracks there are in your family, they get bigger in some ways. So for me it was just the idea of ​​having these three generations of women under one roof in this very tense situation and how they deal with it and the forces that come with it.”

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Gough also spoke to EW about his discussions with Burton and Millar about whether the Maitlands, Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara (Geena Davis), should be included in the new film. “There was a version [of the script] where they just showed up at the end, but the problem is they're ghosts, so they had to kind of look like they were 35, which was never going to happen,” he said. “I think Tim felt, and Miles and I agreed, that their story had been told. So where do we go from there?”