The world is getting a gift it didn’t know it needed so badly: A sequel to the 1988 film “Beetlejuice” and we can thank an Alabamian.

The highly anticipated “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” will hit theaters Sept. 6, and will feature original stars from the film, including Winona Ryder, Michael Keaton and Catherine O’Hara, as well as new stars like Jenna Ortega.

The cult classic comedy about how the living and dead coexist was written by Enterprise, Ala., native Michael McDowell, a horror novelist and screenwriter who died in 1999. The trailer for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” shows a full screen credit near the end: “Based on characters created by Michael McDowell and Larry Wilson.”

Wilson is a screenwriting partner McDowell went to with his original script, according to a story by Matthew Jackson on Syfy.com.

“Imagining a story in which the ghosts were actually the nice people and the living humans were the annoyances, McDowell eventually teamed up with screenwriter and producer Larry Wilson to make the whole thing work as a feature film,” Jackson wrote.

The first “Beetlejuice” film also starred an Alabama native in its cast – the late Glenn Shadix, a Bessemer native, played Otho.

‘Beetlejuice’ gets a second life

In an interesting twist like you might read in one of McDowell’s acclaimed horror novels, the “Beetlejuice” sequel may not have been possible if McDowell’s original vision of the story had been carried out.

Wilson, when interviewed for Yahoo, said the story’s ending was much darker and less comedic. In it, teen daughter Lydia, portrayed by Winona Ryder, did not survive, meaning the adult Lydia (now portrayed by an adult Ryder) would not have appeared in a sequel.

“Our first ending was Lydia — she died in a fire and was able to join Barbara and Adam in the afterlife,” Wilson told Yahoo. “A couple of people said to us, ‘Do you really think that’s a good idea? Is that really the message you want to be sending to the teenagers of the world? Die in a fire?’ So, yeah, it probably was darker.”

McDowell and the macabre

Michael McDowell was born June 1, 1950, in Enterprise, Ala. He received bachelor’s and master’s degree from Harvard College and a PhD in English from Brandeis University in 1978. He lived much of his adult life in Massachusetts and died in Boston at the age of 49.

In his short life, McDowell was the author of more than 25 horror books, including the “Blackwater” series, “The Elementals” and “Cold Moon Over Babylon,” which was made in a feature film “Cold Moon” in 2016.

In addition to penning “Beetlejuice,” McDowell wrote scripts for “Tales from the Darkside: The Movie,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Thinner,” based on a Stephen King novel, as well as several television shows.

King once called McDowell one of the “finest writers of paperback originals in America today” and was friends with the fellow writer. When McDowell died, King’s wife, novelist Tabitha King, was asked to complete the manuscript he was working on at the time. The finished product was published as “Candles Burning” in 2006, with a byline by McDowell and Tabitha King.

“I like to describe Michael McDowell as kind of like the Alabama version of Stephen King,” said Benn Joseph, head of archival processing at Northwestern University, which purchased McDowell’s collection of memorabilia connected to death and mourning. Joseph said McDowell wrote the dissertation for his PhD in English from Brandeis University on the ways society deals with death and began collecting items associated with death customs in the late 1970s.

READ MORE: See the macabre death collection of Alabama horror novelist who wrote ‘Beetlejuice’

“I am a commercial writer and I’m proud of that,” McDowell said in the book “Faces of Fear” in 1985. “I am writing things to be put in the bookstore next month. I think it is a mistake to try to write for the ages.”

And, yet, he did. Beetlejuice is here to stay.