Before I got around to Are You Afraid Of The Dark? and Poltergeist, there was Tim Burton, the first director I knew by name. How could I possibly ignore the fact that Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, Batman, and my favorite, Beetlejuice, were all made by the same person? (Unsurprisingly, Michael Keaton was my favorite actor) But Beetlejuice, more so than the other two, informed my sense of the macabre and my sense of humor toward it. Beetlejuice’s creatures, settings, and attitude toward death are plenty scary and subversive but in a more absurdly mundane manner that makes horror welcoming to outsiders or aspiring outsiders. Beetlejuice and its spin-off cartoon series, which I couldn’t get enough of, made death, tragedy, and horror in the macro funny to me, instilling a gallows humor that aided my transition to Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark, Gremlins, and beyond. [Matt Schimkowitz]