Skaaren was brought on to rewrite the screenplay, and that version is much closer to what was ultimately released. (Burton did not respond to requests for clarification.) But the link between the ghosts and music was most likely dreamed up by screenwriter Warren Skaaren, who died in 1990. Nor does Badami (the music editor), who says the song was slotted into the film before he came onboard. Was it the screenwriters’ idea to swap out the vines for an outré musical number? Wilson can’t remember.

“The rug sprouted vines that wrapped up all the guests. “McDowell and I had come up with a dinner party where one of the guests spilled a glass of wine on an ornate rug with a floral design,” recalls screenwriter Larry Wilson, who wrote the original story with McDowell. There was also to be no music in that pivotal dinner scene. The original screenplay, written by the late novelist Michael McDowell in 1985, was substantially darker than what audiences saw: the story essentially began with the gruesome drowning of Adam and Barbara and concluded with Beetlejuice burning repeatedly before exploding into a ball of fire. The early draft of Beetlejuice had no room for calypso music. When he was handed an oddball screenplay about newly deceased ghosts, he found it. Tim Burton, then in his late twenties, was looking for his next project after failing to get funding for Batman. Skip ahead to the mid-1980s, and a script landed on an eccentric young filmmaker’s desk. I thought it was a very positive force in world culture.” “That was my favorite moment ever, in the history of my life,” Belafonte says. Belafonte even performed it on “The Muppet Show” in 1978. Kiddie music legend Raffi covered it, as did dozens of others. In the subsequent decades, “Day-O” began to reemerge in strange corners of pop culture. The song’s muted intensity is astonishing-remarkable enough, in fact, to have made Calypso, the LP “Day-O” opens, the first album to sell more than a million copies. Later, the vocals are accompanied by a hazy rhythmic pulse, which more or less resembles laborers pounding on makeshift instruments. The recording is distinguished by its remarkable opening instant, in which Belafonte’s utterance of “ daaaay-o” sounds vast and distant. In 1952, the Caribbean singer Edric Connor recorded the tune, calling it “Day Dah Light.” But it was Belafonte’s 1956 version that achieved immortality.

What songs are in beetlejuice