The fun began with bad neighbors. It was the mid-1980s and prolific horror novelist Michael McDowell was trying to break into the movie business. In the wake of blockbusters Poltergeist and Ghostbusters, he hoped to write his own supernatural script. One day, at their home in Medford, Massachusetts, the author and his partner, award-winning Tufts professor Laurence Senelick, were thinking of ideas. Back then, the families living nearby often annoyed them. Senelick can't recall what they did exactly, but it served as inspiration. Did you know this movie was inspired by a bad neighbor?

Spooky films usually featured evil spirits preying on unsuspecting humans. Senelick wanted to flip that premise. "What would be the situation if you had good ghosts," he remembered asking McDowell, "and it's the people who moved into the house who were awful?" With that concept in mind, McDowell devised a professional bio-exorcist to scare off the insufferable occupants.The brainstorming session formed the basic plot of one of the decade's funniest, scariest movies. Released 30 years ago this week, Beetlejuice was the kind of comedy that could only have been thought up by someone possessing a nightmarish sense of humor. "My philosophy, if I have one," McDowell told Fangoria in 1984, "is that the universe is a joke and we are the butt of that joke." Did you watch this movie?

But initially, the script was seen as an intriguing but ultimately impossible oddity. "Everybody wanted to own it," Senelick said. "Nobody wanted to make it." Luckily, what turned the studios off actually appealed to Burton, a former Disney animator fresh off his debut film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure. "The things that interest me the most," he told Rolling Stone in 1988, "are the things that potentially won't work." It took an extraordinary effort to make Beetlejuice work. Without the assistance of a pair of young development executives, a powerful media mogul, and a skilled rewrite man, the movie may have died before reaching the afterlife. Did you like the movie?

East Corinth, Vermont. The quaint New England town provided the ideal backdrop for the clueless excesses of the Deetzes, who turn an old house into a tacky art installation. Burton encouraged improvisation during filming, a direction Keaton took to heart. "You show up on the set and just go nuts," the actor told Rolling Stone. "It was rave acting. You rage for 12 or 14 hours; then you go home tired and beat and exhausted. The famous Belafonte-infused lip-syncing scenes, which led to "Day-O" being played on top-40 radio stations, only happened because the singer's music was easy to license. Do you like Tim Burton's movies?