The movie that made Tim Burton fall in love with the macabre: “The one that did it”
Sadly, I have never been to visit Tim Burton in his house, wherever he lives.
Because he hasn’t invited me, but one likes to imagine that inside it is very dark and gothic, and full of jerky stop-motion marionettes and Helena Bonham-Carter is there clutching a goblet of wine even though they separated years ago, and there’s spooky music playing and a severed hand and probably Johnny Depp. Basically, the Addams family house with celebrities.
All I’m saying is it would be incredibly disappointing to learn that Burton simply resides in a nice, sensible two up two down on a cul de sac somewhere and likes fish fingers for tea, because for decades he has been synonymous with that whole dark fantasy subculture that has meant movies as impressive as Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands, Burton conjuring up a style completely of his own.
He’s done it in six different decades now, lending his twisted take on everything from animation to CGI to musicals, and that’s aside from the gems in his back catalogue that aren’t quite so eerie and wild-haired: Big Fish is a great film that will make the vast majority of men ugly cry and attempt to learn an acoustic cover of ‘Man of the Hour’ by Eddie Vedder. Burton’s debut, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, was incredibly popular, if irritating. And Ed Wood, the 1994 Johnny Depp movie about the cult director, was unlike anything anyone else was doing at the time.
But the two movies that brought Burton his Oscar nominations, 2006’s Corpse Bride and 2013’s Frankenweenie, are much more ‘on brand’ for Burton, fantastically-realised animations that aren’t just for kids and are instantly recognisable as his.
So, where did he get his love of all things macabre? Some years back, he spoke to Danny Elfman, the composer behind so many of Burton’s most memorable scores, including Batman and Beetlejuice, about where his influences lay, saying, “Well, being a big monster-movie fan, the Universal monster movies and the Japanese science-fiction movies, like the ones by Ishirō Honda. Then there were the Italians, like Mario Bava.”
Bava was an influential, low-budget horror director who began working in special effects on monster movies in the late 1950s before graduating to making his own films. He has been referred to as the ‘Master of the Macabre’, and one of his movies in particular cast a shadow over Burton as a youngster.
He added, “Bava’s Black Sunday [1960] is probably the one that did it. I remember, in LA, I’d watch a whole weekend of horror movies. And after you watched about two movies in a row, you’d go into this dream state, and sometime around 3am on the weekend, Black Sunday came on. It really was like your subconscious, like a dream, almost like hallucinating.”
Black Sunday was Bava’s debut film as a director, telling the story of a witch who is killed by her brother, only to return hundreds of years later to seek her revenge. Due to controversy over its depictions of sex and extreme violence, for a time it was banned in several countries, including the UK, but it did huge numbers around the world, regardless, becoming the highest-grossing international film in the US for five years.
Burton, meanwhile, is following up 2024’s Beetlejuice sequel with a modern-day remake of 1958’s Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, which has been co-written by Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn.
