The late 1980s, my peak teenage movie-viewing years, still bear the indelible mark of Tim Burton’s imagination. His trifecta of the period—Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), and Edward Scissorhands (1990)—represents world-building at its finest. I must have seen his Batman half a dozen times in the theater. Conversely, though equally a testament to his brilliance, I can’t bear to watch Edward Scissorhands again; it still crushes me with sadness, three and a half decades later. And Beetlejuice…well, let’s just say that in a landscape crowded with sequels, Burton’s forthcoming follow-up to his camp horror classic—starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, and Jenna Ortega—feels like a true occasion. As Ortega told VF earlier this year in our Hollywood Issue, “To bring Beetlejuice back—of all of the stories—is so good because people need to revisit weird, strange, off-putting stories again.”

Ortega should know. As Wednesday Addams, the role that catapulted her from working actor (since the age of nine) to global star, she has embraced the strange, the dark, the deadpan. For this issue, she tells Michelle Ruiz the story of visiting Burton to discuss the show’s second season, only to have him place the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice script in her hand before she left. She waited a whole 15 minutes before she pulled over on the Pacific Coast Highway and read it. “Instantly I was like, ‘Oh man, they’ve done a thing here,’ ” she says. From there to playing Ryder’s fictional daughter was but a matter of ironing out the logistics. “They both, as young people, had a very strong soul,” says Burton, drawing a through line between Ryder and Ortega. Ruiz talks to Ortega about the complications of fame, her new role as a producer of Wednesday, and what genre inspires the most terror in this 21-year-old veteran of horror films. (Hint: It requires impeccable timing, which she’s got.)

It’s been almost eight years since the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House. Now, as the Democrats rally toward the election in November, Kate Andersen Brower peers into the Obama post-presidency: the podcasts, the docs, the mentoring programs, and the enduring power of Michelle (as well as her enduring aversion to politics). Though Brower reports tension between the camps of 44 and his onetime VP, 46, as the party heads into its convention season, it seems that Obama still seeks to strike his trademark note of hope. And if much of his political legacy could be undone by a second Trump term and an activist court, all the more reason to focus his attention on the generation that will follow.