Michael McDowell was a natural writer, and he was naturally drawn to the macabre. Perhaps it’s no surprise that McDowell, who died in 1999 at age 49, is credited with creating one of the most beloved, creepy-cool film characters of all time – Beetlejuice, the mischievous ghost.

Beetlejuice returns to the big screen Sept. 6, 2024, in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a sequel 36 years in the making. McDowell is credited as co-screenwriter on the original film and with creating the characters in the new film, both of which were directed by Tim Burton.

Born in 1950 in Enterprise, Ala., McDowell grew up to become the author of more than 30 novels (mostly horror), a friend of horror master Stephen King, an expert in death customs, a collector of funereal and mourning ephemera, and a successful screenwriter. His work is still widely read and many novels, such as “The Elementals” and the Blackwater series, are now considered classics of the horror genre.

Who was Michael McDowell?

Michael McEachern McDowell was born to Thomas Eugene McDowell, an accountant, and Marion Mulkey McDowell, a social worker, and raised in Brewton with his sister, Ann, four years younger, and brother James, eight years younger. According to Ann McDowell, she and Michael both attended T.R. Miller High School but not at the same time because of their age difference.

“There was little in his background to indicate that he would become a prolific writer on the occult, the supernatural, madness and the psyches of serial killers,” wrote Myrna Oliver in McDowell’s obituary in the Los Angeles Times in 1999.

McDowell began writing in college, according to the obituary, but his first novel, “The Amulet,” was published in 1979.

“The Amulet” was meant to be a film, says author/actor/director Dr. Laurence Senelick, who was McDowell’s life partner for 30 years until McDowell’s death.

“It began as a screenplay, but his new agents, Jane and David Otte, recommended he rewrite it as a novel,” Senelick said. “It was accepted almost at once.”

While awaiting publication, McDowell “worked as a teacher, a theater critic and a secretary at Massachusetts Institution of Technology until royalties started supporting him,” Oliver wrote in McDowell’s obituary.

Ann McDowell forwarded a mini-biography her brother wrote for Harvard in 1997, in which he said: “When I graduated … I foresaw a stable, calm existence as a university professor.”

McDowell went to graduate school and began work on his PhD at Brandeis, entitled “American Attitudes Towards Death, 1825-1865.”

“Even before I’d started my dissertation, however, I realized that I hadn’t the temperament to be a university professor,” McDowell wrote. “I would have to find something else to do. I’d taken creative writing courses at Harvard, the older brother of my roommate, Peter Galassi, had just become a book editor, so I thought: ‘Well, maybe I should just make a living as a writer.’ Bless my naivete. If I had known the trouble it would be to support myself writing fiction, I would never have started the course.”

McDowell said “The Amulet” was his sixth manuscript to write but first published. It sold in 1978 and was released in 1979.

“It was a horror novel set in Alabama,” he said. “Avon Books saw promise in me, and their advance on the next two books provided enough money to quit work. Able now to write full-time, I completed a dozen more novels under my own name over the next seven years. My best novel is probably ‘The Elementals,’ but I am fonder of the six-­volume serial called Blackwater.”

Move to Hollywood

When the rights to the “Beetlejuice” screenplay sold, McDowell moved to Los Angeles part-time, his sister said.

“When Beetlejuice was optioned he decided to be bi-coastal,” Ann McDowell said. “So, he called and asked if I’d like to move from Alabama and stay in the apartment while he went back and forth (between Los Angeles and his Massachusetts home with Senelick).”

She recalls visiting the set of “Beetlejuice.”

“I went to the set one time and that was for the opening scene,” Ann McDowell said. “I had no idea people were going to like it. I had no experience with the movie business and had nothing to base an opinion on.”

She said Michael is the one who recommended fellow Alabamian Glenn Shadix for the role of Otho. “We first saw Glenn in a play directed by a friend of Michael’s and suggested he audition for Otho,” she said, adding “the play was ‘Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights’ and he played Gertrude Stein.” Shadix died in Birmingham in 2010 at age 58.

Ann McDowell recalled “the parties we had at our apartment, our office that was in a bungalow, and at Glenn Shadix’s. But it was the crew and the ‘live’ people that were at the parties. And that included Tim Burton.”

Senelick said that prose came more naturally for McDowell. “He had to learn the format of screenwriting, and since filmmaking is a collaborative process, I doubt he found the same personal satisfaction in it,” Senelick said. “Some screenplays were made without his name on the screen, though he was paid; others went through innumerable rewrites and went unproduced. Whereas any prose he wrote was published.”

McDowell’s screen credits include co-writer of Tim Burton’s “A Nightmare Before Christmas,” an adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “Thinner,” “Tales from the Darkside: The Movie” and, posthumously, “Cold Moon,” a 2016 film based on his ghostly novel, “Cold Moon Over Babylon.” He was also credited on numerous TV shows such as “Tales from the Crypt.”

In the reverse, he also wrote a novelization to accompany the 1985 movie “Clue.”

The King of popular paperbacks

Stephen King was once quoted as saying McDowell was “the finest writer of paperback originals in America.” (McDowell himself said he purposely wrote for the popular market rather than writing “for the ages.”)

Senelick said he and McDowell were friends with Stephen King and his wife Tabitha King beginning early in McDowell’s career. From their home in Massachusetts, they visited the Kings frequently.

“Stephen and Tabby became friends early on, years before Michael was involved in screenwriting, and he often visited their home in Maine,” Senelick said. “We would get together with them whenever they came to Boston. After Michael’s death, Stephen regretted that they had never collaborated on a book.”

Tabitha King did have that opportunity. Following McDowell’s death in 1999, Mrs. King completed an unfinished manuscript of McDowell’s. It was published as “Candles Burning.”

McDowell “died of an AIDS-related illness on December 27, 1999,” in Massachusetts, according to Brett Chancery in an article for the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

McDowell’s personal papers are housed at Bowling Green State University in Ohio and his death collection is housed at Northwestern University in Illinois, where it can be viewed by appointment.

READ MORE: See the macabre death collection of Michael McDowell

AIDS was viewed as a “death sentence” when McDowell was diagnosed in 1995 but he was philosophical about his illness, writing in his Harvard bio: “Having studied death for a couple of decades, collected it, thought about it endlessly, I wasn’t blind-sided by my infection. It has of course made a difference in my life: I no longer read my horoscope or open fortune cookies. I have learned a great deal about medicine and medical research in America, and I am adjusting my sense of my personal history so that my idea of longevity is now fifty years. But I am still planting trees and spring bulbs and have genuine hope of seeing the new millennium. Recently a friend asked if I felt cheated, and the question came as a surprise. ‘There is no guarantee,’ I told her, ‘that I will die before you do…’” He missed the “new millennium” by four days.