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This Underrated 2005 Horror Movie Put Beetlejuice Star Michael Keaton on the Other Side of Ghostly Terror
If you reach into the void, don't be surprised when the void reaches back and pokes you in the eye.
If you reach into the void, don't be surprised when the void reaches back and pokes you in the eye.
Messing around with the nebulous unknowns of the afterlife can be a rather nasty business, but a grieving spouse — like the one played by Academy Award nominee Michael Keaton in 2005's White Noise (now streaming on Peacock) — can't be blamed for doing everything in their power to get one last interaction with a recently-deceased loved one.
Whether intentional or not, the casting of Keaton as bereaved architect turned ghost whisperer Jonathan Rivers feels like a meta wink to the audience, as the Beetlejuice star gets a taste of the supernatural terror he once inflicted upon the Deetz family in Tim Burton's macabre comedy classic.
Why White Noise screenwriter wanted to "punish" Michael Keaton in 2005 horror flick
"Whenever I write a script, I have a couple of rules above the computer, and the one for this was, 'This guy cannot be let off. [He] cannot be allowed a break from the relentless descent,'" White Noise screenwriter Niall Johnson explained in a 2005 interview with IGN. "Because for one, after Sixth Sense, after movies like that where ghosts need our help — or actually are not good characters, but characters that we should try to understand and empathize with — I thought, 'It's about time we had a film again where ghosts were actually evil.' And therefore, the guy's going to be punished; completely innocent, through no fault of his own through matter of circumstance and coincidence… Finding [himself] at the wrong place at the wrong time, he will end up being destroyed."
What is EVP, as portrayed in White Noise?
After losing his newly-pregnant wife (a bestselling author preparing for the release of her next book) in an apparent drowning incident, Rivers dives headlong down the proverbial rabbit hole of electric voice phenomenon (EVP), or the supposed recordings of individuals who have crossed over to the other side. It's a spooky concept that gets even spookier when the distraught architect begins receiving messages from malevolent, foul-mouthed spirits. "You don't mess with this because bad people in life are bad people in death," said Johnson, recalling the warnings he received from real-world clairvoyants while conducting research for the script.
"Basically, it's like a kid playing with an Ouija board," he continued. "They're saying, 'Just don't f—ing do it. You don't know what you're messing with.' Clairvoyants are guides to protect them and they do it all the time. We should use them as the channel to contact the dead, because they can protect us. Whereas if we play with the Ouija board or stick a tape into a video recorder and hope to tape EVP, we're just bypassing the control mechanisms. That excited me from a research point-of-view, because that's what the film is about."
About halfway through its runtime, however, White Noise intriguingly switches gears, almost becoming an entirely different movie. What starts out as the story of a forlorn man looking for closure by divining messages from his dead wife through the garble of VHS static slowly morphs into a high-concept thriller about a man solving future tragedies with the help of his dead wife.
"I think it captured the spirit of the script," Johnson concluded. "I think there's always issues with telling a story from one medium to another and even though the script is just a blueprint for a film, it exists as one thing as a document, and another as a movie. I think it painted a bleak picture, which is exactly what I was looking for. It certainly found moments of sudden shock that weren't there in the script but just kinda, 'Oh God, there's an opportunity here, an opportunity there.' I was pleased with how it turned out."
White Noise is now streaming on Peacock.
