Beetlejuice (1988)The desert landscape combined with alien sandworms is a clear nod to Dune. During the film's climax, Barbara rides a sandworm into the house in what could also be a reference to the Fremen practice of sandriding.
Sandworms are a species of worm-like creatures which inhabit a world known as "Saturn", but seemingly located in (or at least accessible from) an afterlife realm.
Sandworms are large snake-like monsters and one of them appeared as the secondary antagonist in the movie Beetlejuice. They are a type of creature that lives on Titan, a dusty moon for Saturn. At the end of the movie, one of the Sandworms eat Beetlejuice.
It's not hard to link the inspiration behind Tremors to Dune. The film has a bunch of subterranean monsters known as Graboids plaguing a small town in Nevada. The worm-like creatures spring out of the ground and bring with them a reign of terror, much like Dune's most iconic sandworms.
All kidding aside, Tremors is nothing like Dune, except that everything that happens in this B-movie is because of giant sandworms who look and behave a lot like those in Dune. The Graboids are even attracted to vibrations, just like their space-bound cousins.
Every Dune Reference in Pop Culture (Nerdist Remix)
Was Beetlejuice inspired by Dune?
Other examples of works of fiction inspired by DUNE include: Game of Thrones, The Wheel of Time, Avatar, Tremors, Beetlejuice, and even the design of the Xenomorph in Alien (which was originally going to be used in Jodorowsky's Dune – a film which ended up never getting made) just to name a few.
2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps one of the films more tentatively influenced by Dune, 2001: A Space Odyssey was another work of 1960s sci-fi that would go on to revolutionize the genre. Indeed, 2001: A Space Odyssey still holds up today.
One example of Herbert's real-life inspirations comes in the characters of the Fremen, who Herbert based on both the Bedouin in the Middle East and Native American peoples.
Instead, the worms feed on microscopic sand plankton that exist throughout the desert planet. The plankton feed on traces of melange in the sand which can create the illusion that sandworms are drawn to the spice, but they are actually only interested in the plankton.
Are the sandworms in Beetlejuice a reference to Dune?
Arguably the most iconic piece of imagery in Dune is the sandworm, a titanic creature that has been copied and replicated everywhere from Star Wars to Beetlejuice and Tremors.
She was fifteen, she turned sixteen on the movie. She was a prodigy. From a very young age, she was an old soul. She really got the words and the imagery.
The piece is made of foam-filled latex and a braid of metal wire runs inside the body to act as an inner support. The skin of the puppet was textured for realism. The puppet is made as one solid piece, with the dorsal fin held in place by a small inner wire and is painted with Burton's signature stripe motif.
Feeling alone and betrayed again, Beetlejuice talks with his clones about how he wants to leave the house to finally connect with people now that he can be seen. To achieve this, he decides to trick Lydia into marrying him, which will allow him to roam free in the living world ("That Beautiful Sound" (reprise)).
Saturn appears in the film as a type of limbo, or to be more exact, a vast, endless desert filled with sand dunes and massive brown structures of different shapes reaching skyward and which is inhabited by sandworms. Adam and Barbara arrive here when they try to leave their home by 'normal' means after their death.
Angry, she storms out onto the roof, where she meets Beetlejuice, a demon who dreams about getting rid of the curse that makes him invisible to the living world. Beetlejuice realizes that the girl can see him and is a perfect candidate for breaking the curse.
In Dune , however, blue is not a skin tone, it is an eye color – not for aliens, but for humans. Specifically, it is meant to visualize and symbolize the Fremen, and anyone who is either addicted to spice or has been around it long enough for their eyes to change.
The meaning of "May thy knife chip and shatter" is rooted in the Fremen culture, where it is a common taunt to deliver before a fight. The saying is a way for a fighter to wish harm upon their opponent, as a knife chipping and shattering would certainly bring defeat and likely death.
Sandworms are described as "incredibly tough" by Liet-Kynes, who further notes that "high-voltage electrical shock applied separately to each ring segment" is the only known way to kill and preserve them; atomics are the only explosive powerful enough to kill an entire worm, with conventional explosives being ...
Reacting to his blasphemy, Alia's priests rush forward and stab Paul to death, as Alia and the remaining Atreides watch from above. Over 3,500 years later in God Emperor of Dune (1981), Leto still rules the universe as the Tyrant. The ego-personas of Paul and Leto's other ancestors "live" within his Other Memory.
The biggest Dune controversy was rooted in how the book is a complex epic about the dangers of messianic prophecies, which doesn't immediately read as a fun affair. The film follows three major groups: House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and the Fremen.
Try as he might to steer things in a better direction that doesn't result in humanity's destruction, Paul is still the central religious figure for the zealous Fremen. But even before the events of Dune Messiah Paul is a conflicted hero, or anti-hero — at best.
Author Frank Herbert said in 1979, "The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better [to] rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes."
