The Best Part of ‘Beetlejuice’ Is Catherine O’Hara’s Iconic “Day-O” Performance

Michael Keaton is about to make your millennium, because Beetlejuice 2—aka Beetlejuice Beetlejuice—opens in theaters this weekend. And that makes this the perfect time to revisit the best scene from the original Beetlejuice: Catherine O’Hara and the rest of the cast lip-syncing along to “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song).”

The original Beetlejuice movie, which you can watch streaming on Max, was directed by Tim Burton and written by Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren. Like many Tim Burton films, Beetlejuice injects horror tropes with a dose of absurdity and silliness. Nowhere is that more true than in the scene where the poltergeist Betelgeuse possesses Catherine O’Hara and her family, in an attempt to scare them out of their new home.

If you need a refresher: Delia Deetz (O’Hara) and Charles Deetz (Jeffrey Jones) are fed up with their teenage daughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), who claims she’s communicated with ghosts in their new house. The Deetz invite some friends over for dinner, and Lydia brings up the ghosts again. Delia scolds her daughter for spreading nonsense… then, suddenly, opens her mouth as wide as it can go. “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song),” a traditional Jamaican folk song, blasts from Delia’s mouth like a record playing through a phonograph.

The dinner guests stare as O’Hara launches into a full-bodied lip sync and choreography. Jones, too, is pulled from his seat and forced to join O’Hara in her dance. The other guests (with the exception of Ryder, who is spared) find their limbs being yanked around in a sort of back-up dance.

But the real star of the show is O’Hara. She nails her ridiculous choreography with clean, precise movements and lip-syncs with perfectly-timed, exaggerated enunciation—all while maintaining a look of abject horror on her face. After all, she’s not willingly dancing to “Day-o (The Banana Boat Song).” The ghosts are forcing her to sing about wanting to go home! That’s surely a unique acting challenge, and O’Hara more than rises to the occasion.

It’s a hilarious, weird scene that’s perfect for a hilarious, weird movie. Let’s just hope that the new Beetlejuice movie once again puts O’Hara’s lip-syncing skills to good use. Ru Paul could never!