In Tim Burton’s extraordinary world, the fantastic, the humorous, and the beautiful are inseparable from horror, or rather a celebration of unusual life forms. Burton’s films are coloured with visual quotations from Expressionist cinema such as Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang, 1927), Nosferatu – Symphony of Terror (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1922), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Vigne, 1920) and Hollywood classics Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1931), Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1935). In cinema, the author’s style is formed when directors quote themselves. In each successive film, the aesthetic choices from previous ones are used again creating a concrete cinematic reality.
Long shadows, staircases winding toward loneliness, machines, humans and non-human beings, mechanical works, and the spark separating life and death, are central subjects narratively and visually in Burton’s films. The magical world of expressionism is reborn and still very alluring to the audience. Often, when examining film expressionism, the aesthetic and content characteristics of the movement are pointed out, whilst an essential thread of the films is overlooked: that of the magical, a tradition perhaps inherited from Romantic writers such as E.T.A. Hoffman. In his work, Burton explores the connection between the unusual world of horror, beauty, and bizarre characters and the prosaic one. Lotte Eisner writes about the Germans’ obsession with corridors, staircases, mirrors, and shadows, dating it back to Hoffman’s fairy tale texts.[1] She argues that it is due to the German idea of becoming (Werden in German) replacing that of being (Sein in German), and representing an upward movement. The symmetrical appeal of staircases, which embodies a sense of balance and harmony, should not be underestimated.[2] In Burton’s films, staircases are more a depiction of the conflict between the authenticity of the individual and the conformity of society.
Mirrors and their reflections are as important stylistically as staircases. Reflections can be found not only in mirrored surfaces but also in windows, doors, puddles.[3] The Expressionists move beyond the Impressionist and Surrealist attitude of opposition between reality and dreams; they seek the metaphysical state in which the only overt form of life is that of monstrosity and darkness: ‘Life is merely a kind of concave mirror projecting inconsisting figures which vacillate like the images from a magic lantern, sharp-focused when they are small and blurring as they grow.’[4]
Romantic and Expressionist thought share a fascination with the subjectiveness of emotional perception. Deformed figures are simultaneously human and non-human, e.g., Frankenstein’s monster.[5] Behind the desire to delve into fears, monstrosities and horrors in expressionist cinema, as in Burton’s films, there is a euphoria of discovering new forms of life in extreme bodily states, e.g. Edward from Edward Scissorhands (1990), the headless horseman from Slippy Hollow (1999), Frankenweenie from Frankenweenie (2012), and the array of unaccustomed creatures from Burton’s commissioned films, such as Batman (1989), Batman Returns (1992), and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016). Maya Dimitrova notes of the postmodern author that one is first and foremost a spectator and interpretar.[6]Through his imagination Burton strains the achievements of expressionist cinema, whose visual zenith remains intact. The machines in Metropolis are at work in Edward Scissorhands, while the tower of Metropolis springs up in Gotham City – Batman Returns.
A visual motif in Burton’s films is the lonely castle on the highest peak, originally inhabited by the vampire in Nosferatu – Symphony of Terror, then by Edward Scissorhands, a wealthy family in Dark Shadows (2012). The main characters melancholically climb the endless steps to solitude in Vincent (1982) and Edward Scissorhands, they live in mysterious homes with whimsical interiors or move through dim desolate landscapes. Immersed in demonic darkness, these characters touch the mundane of the human world in often dead-end situations, only to retreat from it wounded. For the monstrous characters, the human socially rigid existence is attractive, yet cruel, while for viewers this encounter with extraordinary living beings on screen is a safe play with the Otherness: ‘The demonic fair is a central motif in expressionist cinema. For the bourgeois intellectual the fair has the attraction of the forbidden Other, a precapitalist form of exchange – the liberation Bakhtin identified with popular carnival.”[7]
The Otherness in Burton’s work is inverted – humans are the Other to the unordinary living beings. Human’s ability to inflict pain by succumbing to primal emotional states sweeps away the naive and deeply vulnerable nature of the monsters.
Starting his creative path from animation, it is not at all surprising that Burton visually quotes another significant 20th-century author – Lotte Reiniger, and her silhouette animations. Inspired by Reiniger’s cinematic style Burton uses her approach of frame composition with colourful backgrounds and silhouettes of the characters.
The shadows take charge of representing conflict situations in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the animated Corpse Bride (2005), the female ghost haunts Faust (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1926), as well as in Dark Shadows. Burton manages to preserve and convey in a new context the aesthetic contributions of expressionist cinema, as well as of its Hollywood successors, always with a humourous undertone. The category of the unusual is absent; it can be scary, funny, sad, or absurd; that is where its appeal lies. The animated series The World of Stainboy (2020) consists of six episodes and was created in association with Flinch Studios, distributed online on the studio’s Youtube profile – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1nKVJTTFqA. The music is again by Danny Elfman, and the narrative explores out-of-the-ordinary circumstances that local superhero Steinboy encounters while battling villains.
In Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) Beetlejuice’s bride appears on screen played by Monica Bellucci, a wink to the classic Bride of Frankenstein (dir. James Whale, 1935). Bellucci’s character assembles herself in search of her beloved. In Genndy Tartakovsky’s animation Hotel Transylvania (2012), Frankenstein’s wife also self-assembles, Burton takes inspiration from animation cinema and attempts to bring its expressive possibilities to live-action filmmaking – entirely achievable for the current technological development of CGI and VFX. It is a curious aesthetic lineage, leading from expressionism in cinema through the first horror films, or rather those involving extraordinary, otherworldly life forms such as the character of Dracula, to the postmodern interpretations of directors such as Burton. The crossing of visual-artistic practices from one genre to another is symptomatic of contemporary film. For example, the lighting solution in the close-ups of Dracula in Dracula (dir. Tod Browning and Karl Freund, 1931), starring Bela Lugosi, was also used in the comedy The Addams Family 1 and 2 (dir. Barry Sonnenfeld, 1991 and 1993). Karl Freund was the cinematographer on Metropolis, Golem (dir. Paul Wenger, 1920), and other significant expressionist films. The mystical lighting on Morticia’s face almost always is present; it is unmotivated, but at its core, it is an interesting aesthetic approach to Morticia’s character design. Burton also touches on the offbeat Adams family, co-directing episodes of the series Wednesday (2022 – ) for Netflix. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, though not in collaboration with Netflix, as well as Wednesday are examples of the marketing influence of large production companies and film studios, with narratives in both projects containing surface-sliding issues relevant to contemporary society. The aesthetic is Burton’s, but the content diverges from the author’s vision and authenticity. An interesting phenomenon provoked by the financial side of cinema and television is the transformation of an aesthetic into a marketable product, not just a product but a brand under which films and series are produced according to the receptivity of the audience.
Bibliography:
Coates, Paul.The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. Cambridge University Press, 1991
Dimitrova, Maya. Metamorfozi v obshtuvaneto: avtor – ekran – zritel. Institute of Art Studies, BAS, Sofia, 2006
Eisner,
Lotte.The Haunted Screen. Thames and Hudson,
London, 1969
[1] Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen. Thames and Hudson – London, 1969, рp. 119, 129.
[2]Ibid., p. 121.
[3]Ibid., p. 130.
[4]Ibid., p. 130.
[5] Coates, Paul. The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. Cambridge University Press 1991, р. 74.
[6] Dimitrova, Maya. Metamorfozi v obshtuvaneto: avtor – ekran – zritel. Institute of Art Studies, BAS, Sofia, 2006, p. 94.
[7] Coates, Paul. The Gorgon’s Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror. Cambridge University Press 1991, р. 28.
