For fans of Tim Burton’s 1998 comedy Beetlejuice, the 2024 sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a fun exercise in nostalgia, reuniting characters who haven’t been on the big screen in 35 years. Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, and Catherine O’Hara revive and evolve their roles from the first movie, even if their characters are underserved and neglected. But Beetlejuice 2 is mostly an exercise in echoing the past: What’s missing is the shock and surprise that came with the first movie, the sense of innovation, novelty, and subversive humor, and the wholly unique world-building around the exasperations of the afterlife.
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For all those elements, Beetlejuice fans should turn to the horror-comedy Dead Talents Society, now streaming on Netflix.
Director John Hsu (the video game superfan behind 2019’s screen adaptation of Detention) channels a wide enough variety of elements in Dead Talents Society to keep viewers guessing, and ensures the social satire will feel different almost from scene to scene. Whether he’s lampooning talk shows, influencer personas and videos, lifestyle reality TV, competition shows, or ghost-chaser programs, though, every story thread comes back to a handful of ghosts pursuing fame and fortune — and avoiding oblivion — by trying to become urban legends.
Reigning “ghostress” superstar Catherine (Sandrine Pinna) has earned Golden Ghost awards and wide acclaim as the contortionist diva behind a classic hotel haunting. But her protégé Jessica (Eleven Yao) has recently surpassed her with a fresh new innovation in scaring mortals: a viral internet video that lets Jessica jump out of people’s computers to scare the crap out of them. As their rivalry heats up, a freshly dead young woman identified as “The Rookie” (Gingle Wang) enters the mix, but finds she lacks the presence or confidence to scare people.
Rookie’s failure at ghost auditions and her cringey, half-hearted haunting attempts leave her existence at risk. Ghosts are tied to the living world through significant objects, and hers has been lost, so soon she’ll fade into nothing. She can only continue on in the afterlife if she proves profitable to a predatory scare-generating corporation, which will give her a pass to continue interacting with the world of the living.
The focus on scares as a form of currency and successful scarers as the world’s biggest celebrities hearkens back to Pixar’s animated favorite Monsters, Inc., but Hsu and co-writer Tsai Kun-Lin are referencing a lot more than that. Drawing equally on real urban legends, decades of Asian horror cinema, viral online videos, pop-idol videos, and reality TV, they veer from one silly mode to the other with manic abandon. They follow the three-way competition between Catherine, Jessica, and Rookie through a variety of lenses, as if it’s mostly a series of TV shows other ghosts are watching.
Image: Sony Pictures International Productions
It’s a chaotic approach, but also a high-energy one, packed with goofy gags and referential imagery, from the mumbling hair-in-face ghostress who evokes movies like The Ring and Ju-On: The Grudge to Jessica’s fluffy red dress, taken from the final act of Satoshi Kon’s anime classic Perfect Blue. Dead Talents Society is simultaneously a media satire and an underdog story, as Rookie teams up with a group of misfits led by grimly positive talent agent Makoto (Chen Bolin). Together, they try to save Catherine’s career, beat the smirking, patronizing Jessica, and keep Rookie from oblivion.
The stakes sound high, but Hsu’s approach of framing the biggest action sequences as reality competition shows or prank shows gives the whole movie an agreeably light, goofy tone and lets it operate at breakneck speed. Good horror-comedy is hard to pull off, but Hsu finds his balance by steering hard into the comedy, while pouring on the fake blood.
There are messages at work here about how so many people these days are hungry to be seen, but can only get attention online by chasing trends and employing gimmicks, leaving any recognition and applause they get feeling a little hollow and lonely. But the movie never hits those notes hard enough to make them maudlin, any more than Beetlejuice feels like a serious exploration of loneliness and loss for gothy teenager Lydia. Rookie’s feelings of frustration and fear are authentic enough to give the movie a little sympathetic warmth.
Instead, Hsu’s film channels some of Burton’s empathy for the alienated and outcast, alongside his early-career rambunctious weirdness, while mixing in a fair bit of media satire and digs at influencer culture. Without feeling imitative or indebted to Burton’s world, Hsu and Tsai Kun-Lin arrive at a similar place, where one of the biggest frustrations of being dead is how much the afterlife resembles actual life, albeit through a twisted funhouse mirror that turns the whole story into an agreeable carnival ride.
Dead Talents Society is now streaming on Netflix.
