Editorials
Why Lydia Deetz from ‘Beetlejuice’ is Forever My Goth Girl Hero
Beetlejuice turned 31 this past weekend, and that makes sense because it’s been a part of my movie-loving memory as far back as I can remember. Both of my parents dug Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, so the slightly strange cinematic dreamscapes of the director and composer were intertwined with my early memories of fairy tales and spooky stories. I started watching the Beetlejuice cartoon in syndication on Nickelodeon when I was five, and there she was: Lydia Deetz.
In the cartoon series, Beetlejuice causes a lot of trouble, but he and Lydia are basically friends. He’s a chaotic influence, to be sure, but Lydia almost always saves the day using wit and tenacity. She’s a goth Lisa Simpson, and I latched onto the character with everything I had. I begged my mom to let me watch the movie, but it turned out to be too scary for me. A few years later, emboldened by my newfound love of The Addams Family, I gave it another try. Wednesday seemed like spiritual sisters with Lydia, and I needed to know if she was as wonderful in the movie as in the cartoon series.
Winona Ryder’s performance and Lydia’s characterization made me feel seen in a way that hadn’t happened since Princess Leia said “someone has to save our skins” in Star Wars. This was different, though, because Lydia wasn’t a space-rebel princess or a warrior princess or a princess at all. She wasn’t supported by a perfect magical family like Wednesday and she didn’t have superpowers, but she was still the coolest person I had ever seen.
By the time I had finally gotten up the nerve to sit through all of Beetlejuice, I was 8 or 9 years old, and I had realized that I really wasn’t like a lot of the other kids in school. I grew up in a family that embraced all things spooky, but I started to feel like we were our own Addams family. My female friends were starting to become obsessed with boys, MTV, and fashion magazines. My male friends were starting to treat me differently, and they were becoming obsessed with sports. I was left with my Nightmare Before Christmas fanart, my Batman Forever soundtrack, and no one who understood my weirdness.
There’s a line in Beetlejuice that’s never left me. When newlydeads Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam (Alec Baldwin) ask Lydia how she can see them despite their ghostliness, she laughs and points out a line in the Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
“Live people ignore the strange and unusual”, she reads. “I myself am strange and unusual.”
That line cut through me and nearly took my breath away. That summer I had gone to visit relatives and toured the family business – a funeral home. It began a morbid fascination with death and the dead that’s never left me, but I had been somewhat ashamed of it before Beetlejuice. Before Lydia, I thought being strange and unusual only meant you got your school lunch thrown at you. After hearing those six words, however, I embraced it.
When I was a bit older, Winona Ryder would give me another massive inspiration with her turn as Veronica in Heathers – another teenage girl possessed by her own macabre free spirit. Lydia is still her crowning achievement, however, giving goth femmes around the world a heroine to idolize. She’s snarky but surprisingly warm, capable of making mistakes and owning up to them. Lydia is the flawed kind of female protagonist more movies need.
It’s not difficult to see Lydia’s impact on pop culture. She’s the matron saint of goth girls, from MTV’s Daria to the girls in The Craft. She’s smart and savvy while still being genuine to her teen girl roots. More than any character in cinema, Lydia Deetz made me feel like it was okay to be strange and unusual, and she showed me that you could look damn good doing it, too.
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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