How 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' Connects to the Original Movie

Warning: This post contains some spoilers for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

After nearly 36 years, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, the long-awaited sequel to Tim Burton's spooktacular 1988 horror comedy classic, has finally arrived in theaters. And with the film garnering generally positive reviews and reportedly tracking to open as high as $80 million at the domestic box office, as Beetlejuice himself would say, "It's showtime!"

Picking up the same amount of time later in the world of the movie, the second Beetlejuice follows a middle-aged Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), now the host of her own paranormal reality TV series, as she returns to Winter River following the gruesome death of her father, Charles Deetz, on an exotic birding expedition. (Charles appears in the Afterlife only as a blood-spurting, headless body, the film's apparent solution to the original actor, Jeffrey Jones, being convicted as a sex offender in 2003.)

Lydia is accompanied to her former Connecticut stomping grounds by her exuberantly narcissistic stepmother, Delia (Catherine O'Hara); disaffected teen daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega); and manipulative hanger-on of a boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux), whom Lydia met at a grief group she began attending following the death of Astrid's father, Richard (Santiago Cabrera). While Astrid believes her mother's medium abilities to be a scam since Lydia can't manage to commune with Richard—the one ghost Astrid has any interest in talking to—Lydia has once again begun catching glimpses of Michael Keaton's titular bio-exorcist, a harbinger of ghoulish things to come at the old Maitland house.

How Beetlejuice returns

While recently deceased couple Adam (Alec Baldwin) and Barbara Maitland (Geena Davis) were ultimately able to banish Beetlejuice after unwisely summoning him to do the dirty work of scaring the Deetz family out of their home in the first movie, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice reveals the undead bogeyman has been biding his time in the Netherworld ever since.

When the Deetz women arrive at the Winter River house, Lydia explains to Astrid that the Maitlands are no longer present because "they found a loophole and moved on to the next plane"—a development that Astrid remarks is "convenient." However, Burton told People that Baldwin and Davis' absence from the film was more due to him not wanting to "just tick any boxes."

"Even though they were such an amazing integral part of the first one," he said. "I was focusing on something else."

Meanwhile, Beetlejuice has once again been scheming to re-enter the world of the living by re-upping his marriage pact with Lydia—who only just managed to escape his clutches in the original movie. This all comes to a head when Astrid gets herself into something of a deadly predicament and Lydia herself is forced to say Beetlejuice's name three times to enlist his help with rescuing Astrid from the Afterlife. Beetlejuice agrees, of course, in exchange for a renewed promise of wedded torment.

More nods to the original

Despite the time jump, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a pretty direct sequel to the first movie and pays homage to its predecessor in numerous ways—from the inclusion of a few different renditions of Harry Belafonte's iconic "Banana Boat (Day-O)" song to the reappearance of the black and white striped sandworms.

It also solves a mystery from the first movie by expanding on the backstory of Beetlejuice's ex-wife, whom we learn is a soul-sucking demon named Delores (played by an ingeniously stapled together Monica Bellucci).

"To me, Delores is interesting because she has a duality. She's scary but also funny, and she's a metaphor of life," Bellucci told ABC News of her character. "We all have emotional scars, and she's full of scars but she's strong."

Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com.