Can we talk a little more about that ending? Because I think I have an idea of what's going on…

BURTON: Then tell me because I have no idea.

Astrid looks like she's seeing her boyfriend again, and then it's like, “Oh, what could happen if they got Beetlejuice…?”

BURTON: No, for me, there were other endings written and stuff, but I just had this idea, because I love Brian de Palma, and it’s kind of a Brian de Palma ending where it's real, but it's not real. Because the emotion was beautiful, like Lydia talking about life and connecting with real people. So, I just felt like it was in the spirit of the movie to kind of mix it up a little bit.

If there is a third movie, would it have to be called Beetlejuice Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ?

BURTON: I know! [Laughs]

Speaking of Lydia's boyfriend, at its core, this movie is very much about trauma and toxic relationships. How do you approach heavy topics like that with a sense of humor and levity?

BURTON: Well, that was a beautiful thing. Michael and I talked about this — there's a lot of commentary, but not too serious. I don't preach about everything, but there were a lot of personal elements for me about that. Again, as we talked about earlier, only time can show you in your own experience of life. I couldn't have made this back in 1989 because I didn't know. Now I feel things after 30 years of coming through a bunch of good and bad ups and downs that you can only know when… It's like when I made Big Fish. I couldn’t have made that film before my father died. I can only make that having those feelings that surprised me. It's the same with this.

It was mentioned that we can't stop humming the theme. It is one of the all-time great movie themes. Do you remember the first time you heard that?

BURTON: Oh, yeah, it was incredible because it was new. It was back in the day when you still would record to a big screen. You’d screen the film and the orchestra would be down there playing. You’d see a full orchestra playing. Those early days were quite exciting that way, you know, a full orchestra playing to the film up on the screen. Very exciting. So to hear that, to see that, that’s a time that I kind of miss, that very special, “Roll the film, play the music.”

1. MacArthur Park (Single Version) – Donna Summer (3:55)
2. Tragedy – Bee Gees (5:01)
3. Day-O – Alfie Davis & The Sylvia Young Theatre School Choir (2:52)
4. Somedays – Tess Parks (2:40)
5. Where’s the Man (2023 Remaster) – Scott Weiland (5:12)
6. Right Here Waiting – Richard Marx (4:28)
7. Svefn-g-englar – Sigur Rós (10:06)
8. MacArthur Park – Richard Harris (7:24)
9. Main Title from CARRIE – Pino Donaggio (2:51)
10. Main Title Theme – Danny Elfman (3:20)
11. End Titles – Danny Elfman (4:35)

Much of The Substance is framed in close-ups with wide-angle lenses, with sets bathed in lurid colors. Fargeat pays homage to a bathroom from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and the general vibe of her film suggests a meeting of Dr. Strangelove’s humor and the New French Extremity movement’s brutality. It’s an ultraviolent hothouse cartoon of avarice. Kubrick aged into a scold, but Fargeat can admit that the decadence she’s parodying and indulging turns her on. This is a feminist midnight-movie freak show, and Fargeat is willing to beat horny male filmmakers at their own game while spanking them for their misconduct. As she also illustrated in the equally unhinged Revenge, the thin line between critique and hypocrisy is her natural habitat.

The Substance rarely steps outside or ventures beyond three characters: Elizabeth, Harvey, and Sue (Margaret Qualley), a young upstart rival of an unusual nature. Borrowing a subtle device from David Cronenberg’s The Fly, Fargeat compresses a potentially epic premise down to a few locations and variables. Most of the narrative is set in Elizabeth’s apartment, the soundstage for the fitness show, and a few warehouses and studios. The film is insular and claustrophobic, placing us almost subliminally on Elizabeth’s harried wavelength.

Among the stylization and cheeky editorial dialogue, Moore’s naturalistic performance serves as a powerful counterpoint. There was a steely earnestness to her work in her ingenue days, an eagerness to prove herself that was appealing but tended to freeze her up. In The Substance, that steel is contextualized as a fading defense device. Moore achieves a casualness of being that often happens to beautiful stars who survive the game long enough to absorb said survival into their essence. The stakes are upped by the fact that Elizabeth is unavoidably a riff on Moore herself, who’s played her own version of the Hollywood commodification game.

Moore’s payday for going topless in Striptease in the 1990s was treated as a shot heard around the world by the press, and the film itself was revealed to be an embarrassingly self-conscious non-event. Moore is also frequently nude in The Substance, but the context is markedly different. We often see Elizabeth naked either in her large bathroom or in a chamber behind the bathroom that’s seen as a kind of cocoon. This is a place without endlessly scrutinizing eyes, one of refuge, and Fargeat films Moore tenderly. In these sequences, The Substance lets up on the flashy aesthetic and gross-out jokes, and Elizabeth is allowed to simply be a person, contemplating with considerable pain an inevitable shift into older age.

The humanity of Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat. This is a blend of body horror film and feminist satire that’s more than a tribute reel to the usual masters of the genre. When Elizabeth’s back splits open on the bathroom floor and Sue arises fully formed out of a viscous placental sac, we’re processing more than uniquely inventive special effects. We’re seeing a woman voluntarily efface herself, tagging in a newer model who can satisfy the carnal appetites of the Harveys of the world.

Via a kind of deus ex machina, Elizabeth learns of a black-market procedure that promises the regeneration of her cells, allowing her to be a better version of herself. The details of The Substance—how it’s obtained, injected, and maintained—are among Fargeat’s sharpest satirical flourishes. Think Lewis Carroll’s wild irrationality united with Philip K. Dick’s distrust of corporations as a parody of the self-improving snake oil that’s sold to people, with sexy and fashionably minimalist ad campaigns that are meant to suggest confidence and legitimacy.

Sue is supposed to be this better version of Elizabeth, though the faceless mastermind of The Substance has to remind them both that they’re one in the same woman, and that they need to work together. Elizabeth must regenerate while Sue is out in the world and vice versa, and they must switch places every seven days. Inevitably, this balance is ruptured, and a fight for dominance commences as Sue grows in power and prominence.

Fargeat films Qualley differently than Moore, as Sue reflects the populace’s fantasies of luscious rising celebrities as well as Elizabeth’s self-loathing. Qualley is lit and made up here to suggest the faint anonymity of Hollywood sexiness: Her face is softened and colored like cotton candy, her lips are accentuated, and she’s often in pink undies and butt-hugging workout gear.

Fargeat drinks in Qualley so rabidly that even Michael Bay might be driven to blush, staging objectifying scenes that are hot and funny and resonant. Qualley’s airbrushed-feeling sexiness here may startle people who are familiar with her eccentric and highly personable previous performances, and a portion of that audience may have to confront the fact that they like this sexbot version of Qualley despite their better instincts.

When Sue cracks open a Diet Coke, the glistening soda complimenting her moist lips, the charge of the image springs from the fact that the satire of commercial objectification can’t dispel the disreputable eroticism of the moment. When Sue takes over Elizabeth’s show, Fargeat springs an even wilder set piece, a workout number so robotically sexual that it suggests a Jazzercise session restaged as a lap dance from Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. Fargeat’s premise allows her to mount a free-associational essay on men’s hunger for women as well as women’s simultaneous craving of that attention and resentment of it. That idea also drove Showgirls and its precedent, All About Eve, and as long as The Substance is mining this turf, it’s exhilarating.

The Substance is also an unwieldy movie-movie that desperately needs to come up for air at some point. To borrow a Cronenbergian metaphor, things keep growing out of this film, and Fargeat’s cinema fever is sometimes at odds with her powerful take on two women, sisters of sorts, who feel as if they need to destroy each other in order to matter.

In that vein, it makes sense to lean on Showgirls and Brian de Palma’s Carrie and Brian Yuzna’s Society and even Cronenberg’s The Fly, but the late-inning embrace of the imagery of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream feels slapdash, momentarily knocking The Substance off its axis. But it’s impossible to deny that Fargeat’s film holds you even at its most frenzied, and it ends on an unforgettable image that circles back to the first, in which Elizabeth’s monstrous self-loathing is granted the reprieve of her biggest fear: obscurity.

Perkins’ film is full of left-field surprises, made more unexpected by its blend of genres. Set in the morally dicey 1990s, it’s a bit rural police procedural, a la “Twin Peaks,” but its supernatural and religious elements add shades of Brian De Palma’s “Carrie.” As does Perkins’ artful shots.

Fear lurks under every ideally lit archway. And each detailed, stale room has the same foreboding of exploring your grandparents’ dusty old basement as a child.

And as Lee investigates these sinister places, [Maika] Monroe is excellent. Her Lee is troubled and off-putting, yet unsuspectingly funny, too. Phone calls with Lee’s slightly off mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) are layered. They don’t seem to like each other much, but she calls mom daily all the same.

Monroe has had an up-and-down career. I especially enjoyed her in 2019’s “Honey Boy,” although there have been quite a few more “Bling Ring”s on the resume. This focused and serious performance will mark a turning point in the actress’ career.

[Nicolas] Cage’s left turn into Crazytown happened a long time ago, and I’m loving the warped ride.

What’s so unsettling about his Longlegs is, as big and cartoonish as he is, the weirdo is just believable enough. You could run into him late at night at a highway rest stop or, God forbid, on an empty subway platform. Cage makes a meal out of the murderer.

During this so-so summer at the movies, something’s finally got legs.

Academy Award winner — and Texas native — Sissy Spacek will appear at the 17th annual El Paso Community Foundation Plaza Classic Film Festival, which runs from July 18-28 in and around El Paso’s historic and restored Plaza Theatre.

Spacek will appear with Coal Miner’s Daughter at 7 pm Saturday, Juy 27 in the Plaza Theatre. She received the Academy Award for her inspired portrayal of legendary country singer and songwriter Loretta Lynn in the 1980 Michael Apted classic, in which Spacek did her own singing.

Sissy Spacek has been one of the industry’s most respected actresses in a career spanning six decades. Her many honors include an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, five additional Oscar nominations, a Grammy nomination, three Golden Globe Awards, and numerous critics awards.

Born in Quitman, Texas, Spacek aspired to be a singer-songwriter before her acting career took off. She first gained the attention of critics and audiences in Terrence Malick’s widely praised Badlands, on which she met production designer Jack Fisk, with whom she celebrated her 50th wedding anniversary this year.

Spacek earned her first Academy Award nomination for her chilling performance in the title role of Brian de Palma’s Carrie, based on the Stephen King novel (also showing in PCFF 2024). Other notable film credits include Three Women, Fisk’s Raggedy Man, and Oscar-nominated performances in Missing, The River, Crimes of the Heart, and In the Bedroom. Other film credits include The Straight Story, JFK, and The Help. She also starred in Netflix’s Bloodline, Hulu’s Castle Rock, and Amazon Prime Video’s Homecoming and Night Sky, with a recurring role in FX’s forthcoming Dying for Sex.

In the book, the gym teacher was named Rita Desjardin, but called Miss Collins in the movie. Future Broadway and Eight Is Enough star Betty Buckley played Miss Collins on screen. She also petitioned director Brian De Palma to let her character live!

“I kept saying to him, ‘She shouldn't die. She didn't die in the book,’” Buckley, 76, tells PEOPLE. “And I'm like, ‘Seriously, Brian, don't kill Miss Collins off. Let her go to the end.’”

Unlike in the novel, which saw the gym teacher survive, Miss Collins becomes one of Carrie’s victims at the prom after Carrie is doused in a bucket of pig’s blood in a humiliating prank pulled by her chief tormenter Chris (Nancy Allen).

Furious and embarrassed, Carrie locks the doors of the school, trapping everyone inside while an electrical fire breaks out.

As chaos ensues, Miss Collins is crushed to death by a falling basketball backboard. “That was my first death scene. It was pretty classic,” says Buckley, who felt uneasy about filming it after seeing a stunt coordinator working on the movie get seriously injured.

The coordinator was doing another scene in which he was thrown in the air as one of Carrie's classmates who gets killed. “There was a mattress for him to land on, and they miscalculated the distance and he hit the ground and hurt himself badly,” recalls Buckley.

“So we all witnessed that and we’re like, ‘What? Are we in safe hands?” adds Buckley, who became nervous that she’d be injured, too.

Buckley’s character is pinned against a wall when the basketball backboard falls. The pendulum-like apparatus was on ropes, and Buckley says there was a piece of balsa wood that was supposed to prevent any injury to her: “That was the safety mechanism.”

“Oh, this'll work,” Buckley says she was told, but she was not entirely sure: “The terror you see from Miss Collins when that happened was absolutely real.”

Despite that, Buckley, who starred alongside Spacek, Allen, John Travolta, Amy Irving and William Katt in the film, loved making Carrie.

“We all had so much fun, and there were seven of us making our film debut, including John Travolta,” she says. “And the group of us were just so excited to be doing it. Sissy Spacek had done some films, and so she was a veteran, all chill and everything. And the rest of us were like, ‘Oh, Hollywood, we're so excited to be here!’”

In “On Writing,” Stephen King’s nonfiction account of his career, he talks about a girl he calls Dodie Franklin. She attended his high school and, he recalls, was often bullied for wearing the same clothes every day. In their sophomore year, on the first day back after Christmas vacation, she came to school wearing newly fashionable clothes with a trendy hairstyle — but the bullying and teasing never stopped. “Her peers had no intention of letting her out of the box they’d put her in,” Mr. King writes. “She was punished for even trying to break free.”

The realization that nothing could change Ms. Franklin’s social standing, coupled with a few more unfortunate examples of young women he knew, helped inform a story about a bullied girl with telekinetic powers who is pushed to her limits and who wreaks brutal revenge on her classmates and, eventually, her abusive mother. “Carrie,” Mr. King’s first published novel, was released 50 years ago, in 1974.

There have been many iterations of “Carrie” since. Horror enthusiasts will recall the classic film directed by Brian De Palma and released in 1976; there have been several remakes, most recently one in 2013 starring Chloë Grace Moretz. There was an ill-fated stage adaptation, “Carrie: The Musical,” which the TV show “Riverdale” once paid homage to. Many things have changed in the half-century since Mr. King’s novel was published, yet Carrie White remains a strikingly relevant and highly relatable figure. She raged her way to a place in pop culture’s pantheon. But why? I first read “Carrie” as a nerdy, horror-enthused 14-year-old growing up in Sri Lanka. At the library of the Christian school I attended, Mr. King’s books were extremely hard to come by, so when I saw a copy at a friend’s house, I was quick to borrow it. I vividly remember being drawn to Carrie’s wide-eyed gaze on the cover, blood trailing from her forehead and dripping down her chin. “Nobody was really surprised when it happened,” it reads in the opening pages. “Not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow.” I was hooked. What did Mr. King mean by “savage things”? I didn’t realize then that I would spend so much of my adult life thinking about this very question.

I’ve reached for “Carrie” many times since, and my relationship with the story has continued to shift and evolve. Like most teenagers, I suppose, I initially reacted to Carrie’s story with pure horror; I was mortified by the way she was teased, repulsed by the pig’s blood that gets dumped over her at prom and fascinated by the death and destruction she wrought in retaliation. In my 20s, when I revisited the novel, the horror I felt at her tale turned to something closer to sympathy. By that point, I’d moved from Colombo to California to Britain and then back to my hometown in Sri Lanka and had chalked up enough life lessons to understand Carrie’s suffering in a different way. Now, as a woman in my 30s, I no longer see Carrie as simply a victim to be pitied. I’ve learned to relish her rage. Her anger has inspired much of my own fiction writing and, more important, has taught me that anger, when channeled, can be an asset. This truly hit home for me in July 2022, when I joined thousands of protesters in Colombo marching against corruption and the economic mismanagement of the country’s leaders. Years of feeling powerless finally erupted. We were all angry, of course, but we used our rage as fuel.

In Carrie, Brian De Palma flaunts his virtuosity as a filmmaker (is there a passage in ’70s Hollywood as elegant as Carrie’s long, slow walk to the stage, culminating in the fall of the blood bucket, at which point the somnolent slowness goes from lovely to agonizing?) as much as he displays his bone-aching empathy for the tragic Carrie White (Sissy Spacek). Adapting Stephen King’s debut novel at the advent of King’s reign in the book world and in Hollywood, on his way to becoming the most pervasive presence in pop-culture of the 1980s (it was his endorsement that helped bring Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead success), De Palma creates a harmonious marriage of formal bombast and tender humanity, capturing the panic spread by the unusual and the pain of the daily banalities of being a teenage girl in America.

“Virtuosity” and “humanity” also describe Piper Laurie’s staggering performance as Margaret White, Carrie’s mother, a fervid acolyte of some notion of Christ whose beliefs and implementation of punishment for minute sins are unorthodox, but she believes with all her heart. Her faith remains unwavering. The film’s cast is an eclectic array of characters with quirks and personalities, some modest and “realistic” (Amy Irving’s Sue, afflicted with guilt) and some decidedly villainous (Allen’s queen bitch and her thuggish, beer-swilling, swine-killing boyfriend played by John Travolta) in that distinct, classic way of the pre-slasher horror picture, a genre founded upon fear of the strange (Baudelaire’s affinity for the anomalous is very much relevant here).

Laurie’s God-fearing matriarch is outlandish, realized with some capital-A acting at the apogee of New Hollywood histrionics and opposite Spacek’s very internalized, kind-and-loving performance, emotions conveyed in meek terseness and downward-gazing eyes. With hair the color of sin sticking out all frizzy and unkempt, her makeup-less face wide in divine expression as she spreads the word of God translated into her own sui generis piousness, Laurie’s return to Hollywood after a 15-year absence (following her acclaimed performance in 1961’s The Hustler) is indelible and incendiary. Her presence in the film is exaggerated, a performance with an exclamation point, yet still steeped in humanity, strangled by the trauma of corrupted innocence and the desperation to make sense of one’s life. She had a kid and it ruined hers; you hear such stories all the time, hear the sanctimony of parents telling teens to abstain because the last thing they want is a kid too young.

When Margaret hurls her daughter into the closet for blaspheming, it’s not hatred of her daughter that has her quaking, but hatred of herself for birthing spawn that possesses the power of the Devil.