Today we are pulling on our striped demon ghost suits for a special Halloween episode: a deep-dive on Tim Burton’s 1988 classic, Beetlejuice. It persists in our cultural memory, remade as an animated series, a theme park ride, a musical, and as of last month, a legacy sequel, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. We talk about why it’s endured with such ferocity, how the sequel compares, and whether films like it even exist anymore. We also share our own, and listeners’, top Halloween films. Lilah’s joined by FT horror movie superfan Topher Forhecz and political columnist, film buff and Beetlejuice hater Stephen Bush.

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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap, and email at lilahrap@ft.com. And we’re grateful for reviews on Apple and Spotify!

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Clips this week courtesy of Warner Bros

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If you live outside a swing state, you might — if you really try — almost forget there is a tumultuous US election under way. If you live inside one, not so much.

Lawn signs. Billboards. Text messages. So many text messages. In the seven battleground states that will decide the US election, political ads are everywhere, all the time. The White House race is inescapable.

As one of the tightest presidential elections in living memory enters its final days, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are criss-crossing the country to make their final pitch to voters in the swing states.

Their campaigns are there 24/7. While some people elsewhere in the US can tune out of the frenzy, voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are being inundated with some of the most sophisticated and targeted messaging and advertising in political history.

And some of that is just downright blunt.

There are the classic campaign placards pitched on lawns and in windows and crowding verges along roads, as well as television ads flooding the airwaves.

Added to the campaigns’ arsenals are digital ads, particularly on social media, and a steady stream of personalised text messages pleading for donations and urging people to turn out to vote on November 5, or before.

The 2024 election is on track to be the most expensive ever, with the vast majority of funds going to advertising.

The Harris campaign and its affiliated committees have pumped more than $1.1bn into advertising, almost double the $602mn spent by the Trump campaign and its aligned committees, according to the FT’s ad tracker. 

The swing states that will decide the vote have received $1.36bn of the two campaigns’ combined spending. The biggest share — $373.5mn — has gone to Pennsylvania, considered the most crucial battleground state.

“I think everyone is just ready for it to be over,” said Tracee Malik, a real estate agent from the Pittsburgh area. “Pretty much the only commercials that we have now are the political commercials.”

Harris’s most-aired TV spots have focused on her prosecutorial and middle class background, defence of reproductive rights, and claims that Trump cares only about the wealthy. Others focus on her rival as being “too unstable to lead”.

Trump’s most-aired ads have been about the economy, blaming Harris and President Joe Biden’s economic agenda for the high cost of living. But his most played spot attacks the vice-president for supporting gender affirming care for prison inmates, telling voters: “Kamala’s agenda is they/them, not you.”

In Pennsylvania, Arizona and Nevada, Trump ads also slam Harris over immigration, while in Georgia and North Carolina, pro-Harris ads concentrate on abortion rights.

Is the barrage working? It’s unclear.

“I hate that advertising,” said Vallon Laurence, a retired member of the US Navy who lives in Atlanta, Georgia. “If you go by the advertising . . . you don’t want either one of them.”

Local issues also feature in the campaigns. Pro-Harris ads in North Carolina link Trump to Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial candidate who has been embroiled in a scandal over allegations — vehemently denied by him — that he posted racist comments on a pornography website.

Simultaneously, pro-Trump groups are sending texts assailing Harris and the Biden administration for a slow recovery effort from Hurricane Helene, which devastated the western part of the state.

On social media, the campaigns can target small groups of voters, tailoring content based on age, gender or even interests using memes, news or a chain email format.

The Harris campaign has spent more than $10mn promoting generic-looking Facebook pages with titles such as “The Daily Scroll”, boosting favourable news articles.

Democrats have also taken advantage of digital targeting tools to address women, particularly on abortion rights, blaming Trump for the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade.

More than a quarter of the Harris campaign’s Facebook and Instagram ads have been seen by an audience that is at least two-thirds women. Virtually none had the same margins for men.

Pro-Harris super Pacs — political action committees, or fundraising and spending groups, that aren’t allowed to co-ordinate with the campaigns — have been targeting women even more aggressively: 51 per cent of their Meta ads reached a predominantly female audience, compared to only 2 per cent at equivalently male audiences.

But irritation with the flood of propaganda has spread, even to down-ballot races. A ferocious battle for a US Senate seat from Montana — which could decide which party controls the upper chamber of Congress — has exhausted local residents.

The state has had the highest ad spending per voter in recent weeks, surpassing the battlegrounds, according to Financial Times analysis.

“It just hits you in the face,” said Emma Fry, 21, a student in Bozeman who recently came home to find a pile of political flyers and letters on her porch.

“They’re absolutely everywhere. And at some point people are just annoyed,” she said. “We’ve got to pray for the day it’s just over, because we need to wrap this up.”

Additional reporting by Myles McCormick in Atlanta and Bozeman, Montana, and Oliver Roeder in New York; video editing by Jamie Han

In regard to Andrew Anderson’s contention that there is “no planetary crisis” (“Earth can live without us, just as it did for millennia”, Letters, October 22), it is not so much that the earth could survive perfectly well in the future without us, as much as the catastrophic impact we are having, and will have had, on its biodiversity by then.

We share the earth with other life forms that will not survive because of our brief span here. I believe a sixth mass extinction driven by human activity could be considered a planetary crisis.

Paul Littlewood
St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK

Alan Beattie’s opinion piece “The magic pony of private finance fails to fund the global green transition” (Trade Secrets, FT.com, October 17) rightly dismisses the notion that small amounts of public money can mobilise vast sums of commercial capital for the green transition in emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs).

But the problems go beyond the shortcomings of multilateral development banks and development finance institutions, and into the risk culture and regulatory incentives faced by private investors.

Pension funds in the UK allocated a mere £14.2bn, just 0.5 per cent of their assets, to EMDEs in 2022. This cautious approach is often driven by advisers whose interpretation of fiduciary duty focuses solely on financial returns rather than on environmental, social and governance factors — but even on these terms they may be missing out.

Our research shows that emerging market equities performed just as well as US markets between 2002 and 2021, and outperformed non-US developed markets. Emerging market bonds have also outperformed developed market bonds in most years since 2008.

Insurance companies, meanwhile, face a regulatory environment that discourages investments in higher-risk or less liquid assets, including EMDE infrastructure, even though these might be more profitable in the

long run. Regulations like the EU’s Solvency II impose capital charges disproportionate to the actual risks, leading to an unfair treatment of non-OECD infrastructure investment. Sustainable finance regulations, such as the EU’s green asset ratio, exclude sustainable investments outside the EU, further complicating the landscape.

With so much global growth shifting to EMDEs, private investors in developed markets are missing out on potentially lucrative returns, as well as the opportunity to invest in sustainable growth. Tackling regulatory and behavioural barriers in these private institutions could unlock the capital needed for a global green transition.

Samantha Attridge
Principal Research Fellow, ODI
London SE1, UK

A LUCKY lottery winner nearly missed that he had scooped a £500,000 jackpot after he “assumed” there was a lag on the system.

A computer maintenance engineer is finally celebrating his £500,000 lottery win a year after having surgery for cancer.

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The win comes after a painful 24 hours of waiting as John Lingard, from Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, said he initially saw no increase on his bank account’s available funds.

“I assumed there must be a lag or something on the system, so went to work and didn’t give it another thought,” he said.

“Even when I logged on later that day to buy my EuroMillions ticket, I didn’t look more deeply into the message that popped up congratulating me on a win.

“It was only 24 hours later that I finally read my messages and the penny started to drop, although not fully, because at first glance I thought it was £500.10.

“I was just on my way out the door, heading to the supermarket, but when I worked out that it was actually £500,000 plus £10 on another line, I decided driving wasn’t a good idea so walked to the local shop,” he added.

John bought a Lucky Dip ticket for the September 25 draw via the National Lottery app, and his winning numbers were 13, 15, 18, 30 and 33 with Thunderball number 7.

He said he “felt like I was on cloud nine” when he realised he had won £500,000 in the Thunderball draw.

The engineer’s lotto success follows a nasty cancer diagnosis which saw him have one of his kidneys removed to stop the spread of the disease.

He has since been given the all clear.

The 66-year-old plans on spending some of his winnings with friends in Tenerife – a place he visited a year ago to find some peace and calm after he was first diagnosed.

“It’s crazy to think that at the start of the year I would come to the beach to find inner peace in all the turmoil of the treatment and my worries about the future,” he said.

He added: “I couldn’t have dreamt that less than 12 months later I would be here celebrating a National Lottery win!”

His trip will be the first week of unpaid leave for the engineer since he started work at 16.

“I visit Tenerife three or four times a year, but when I left in September I told friends I probably couldn’t make it back before early 2025,” he said.

“Now, thanks to my Thunderball luck, I can afford to take a week off – unpaid – and head back for a little winter sun, and to celebrate with my friends over there,” he continued.

The engineer also said he might do a little house-hunting while on the island to have a “bolthole for the future” and so that he can share some of his fortune with those closest to him.

John added that he has no plans to retires but is keen to spend his money doing fun things with friends.

But first it will take some time adjusting to his new fortune.

He said: “I started playing when the National Lottery first began 30 years ago and, while all along I’ve believed that one day I would win big, now it’s happened it’s taken a bit of getting used to!”

“And having been through such a challenging time with my cancer diagnosis and treatment, I want to be sure I make the most of every moment, whether that’s work, rest or play.”