Jenna Ortega and Winona Ryder are opening up about working with a certain costar on Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: the giant Sandworm.

Director Tim Burton and his team of stop-motion animators brought the classic Beetlejuice monster back from the Afterlife for the sequel, which premieres in theaters Sep. 6. "It was a lot of sand and a lot of wind," Ryder tells Entertainment Weekly in a conversation with costar Catherine O'Hara. "I think it's common knowledge [that] it's really hard to run in the sand. I used to have dreams where you're running in the sand, so it was that."

In a separate chat with stars Michael Keaton, Monica Bellucci, Willem Dafoe, and Justin Theroux for EW's Around the Table video series, Ortega recalls the practical effects that went into pulling off the sequence. "It was really wonderful, and Tim's really great because he always shows references or images or drawings or things that he has in mind," the Wednesday actress recalls. "So he showed me some of his sketches of the Sandworms."

The Sandworm of 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice'.

Warner Bros.

Beetlejuice star Winona Ryder thought Lydia would be 'this spinster' rather than a mom in sequel

The Sandworm first popped up in 1988's Beetlejuice when Barbara (Geena Davis) and Adam Maitland (Alec Baldwin), a married couple now stuck as ghosts haunting their own home, attempt to leave their Winter River grounds and instead fall into the desert domain of these beasts. The creatures also featured in the animated Beetlejuice kids show that premiered in 1989 and the Broadway musical adaptation.

The striped stop-motion creation is back again when Ryder's Lydia Deetz and her daughter, Ortega's Astrid, find themselves running for their lives in that same desert.

"We shot with a huge wind fan blowing each way to let us know when the worm was coming, and when it was going, or little pockets of sand popping out of the ground as we were running so we knew that they were [there]," Ortega says. "It was weird; it definitely made it feel more real, which is strange talking about clay worms, but you really did feel like they were after you with the way that everything was: the ground was shaking, and things were moving."

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice picks up years after the original, when the death of Charles Deetz (originally played by Jeffrey Jones) prompts Lydia and her stepmother, Delia (O'Hara), to return to their house in Winter River, where they first encountered Keaton's demonic bio-exorcist. Certain events transpire that lead to the opening of a portal to the Afterlife, which again throws the home in disarray.

Jenna Ortega's Astrid and Winona Ryder's Lydia flee from a Sandworm in 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice'.

Warner Bros.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice... Beetlejuice returns in first look at Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder

Bellucci joins the cast as Delores, the ghastly ex-wife of Beetlejuice on the hunt for her former flame; Dafoe appears as Wolf Jackson, a B-list movie actor in life and a ghost beat cop in death; and Theroux plays Rory, Lydia's boyfriend and TV producer on the paranormal series Ghost House that she hosts.

Keaton remembers how "many things were handmade" in the 1988 original that were "done by craftsmen and art departments, as opposed to a lot of CGI." Burton actively wanted to bring that back, including for the Sandworm element. "It needed a back-to-basics, handmade quality," the filmmaker previously told EW. "It reenergized why I love making movies."

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Watch the full conversation with the cast of Beetlejuice Beetlejuice for EW's Around the Table in the video above.