Tim Burton’s favourite creature feature: “There’s a beauty to these films”
When you think of the word ‘gothic’ in relation to filmmaking, your mind immediately wanders to Tim Burton. The British auteur has turned wearing black into a billion-dollar industry, ensuring that moody teenagers have had posters to fill their walls for decades.
That’s probably incredibly reductive, but you get the idea. His best-loved movies transport the viewer to faraway lands or bring a little bit of the supernatural into the everyday. Either way, people go nuts for him.
As a result of his many forays into fantasy, Burton’s films contain a variety of weird and wonderful creatures. Edward Scissorhands is about a scientific experiment gone wrong, leaving a synthetic human with cutting implements for hands. The two Beetlejuice movies focus on a foul-mouthed, striped-suited demon, while his two adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland novels are full of the strange oddities dreamt up by the author. By ‘dreamt up’, we of course mean conceived while off his nut.
It should come as no surprise that Burton is a fan of the good old-fashioned creature feature. A staple of the early days of horror, this subgenre focuses on a specific monster, pitting a gang of plucky heroes against the otherworldly force. Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolf Man, and more built studios like Hammer and Universal. They’re not as popular these days, but there’s still a market for them through recent releases like Barbarian and Nope.
Burton’s creature feature of choice is the 1966 Japanese movie The War of the Gargantuas. The film, which was released in 1970 in the US, holds a special place in the director’s heart, as he explained to Rotten Tomatoes. “It’s my two-year-old daughter’s favourite movie,” he revealed, adding, “She’s the green gargantua and my other son is the brown one, and she loves being the bad green gargantua. She’s obsessed with it.”
Directed by Ishirō Honda, the man who made the first Godzilla movie, The War of the Gargantuas pits two giant kaiju brothers against one another. Yū Sekida’s Sanda is a benevolent brown monster who is brought in to fight off his evil clone, Haruo Nakajima’s Gaira, when he goes on a rampage. In typical nutty Japanese fashion, both creatures are descendants of Frankenstein’s monster. The film has become a major cult classic, with all sorts of famous faces showing love for it over the years. Burton’s daughter is in good company.
By his own admission, the director was also a fan of the film long before his offspring got involved. “I grew up watching Japanese science fiction movies, and I particularly, unlike most hardcore film people, like dubbed movies,” he continued. “There’s something about that language and the translation that somehow fits into the movie; it’s like a weird poetry. There’s a beauty to these films, the Japanese character designs, there’s a human kind of quality to these things, which I love. Monsters were always the most soulful characters.”
It’s easy to see the impact this reading of the movie has had on Burton’s career. Many of his most successful films put ‘monsters’— an obvious allegory for social outsiders—front and centre, imbuing them with an aura of humanity that few other filmmakers can generate. Let’s hope he can embody this spirit on his next purported project, a remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman starring Margot Robbie.
