How to See Things Differently: Tim Burton’s Reimaginings

Abstract

Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) emerges from his earthy prison to find Collinsport, Maine, much changed from the colonial fishing port he last set eyes upon 200 years ago. Bedeviled by monstrous construction equipment, satanic Golden Arches, and unnervingly smooth tarmac, he eventually stands transfixed by a pair of blazing Gorgonic orbs that rush toward him at supernatural speed. Expecting death, he is instead unceremoniously told to “Get out of the road, asshole” by the car’s panicked driver. Wrenched out of his New World fiefdom, this undead aristocrat has been rudely awakened to the fallen world of Nixon’s America. His abrupt recontextualization is disconcerting to say the least. Darkly Byronic romanticism is now passé, supplanted by the banalities of the Carpenters, the studied glam of T. Rex, and the calculated grotesqueries of Alice Cooper. He endeavors to restore the grandeur of his family name but finds the process of adaptation distasteful. In short, Barnabas discovers to his dismay that enthrallingly Gothic dark shadows have been enfeebled by postmodernity’s florescence, and he is but an insubstantial shade. His second coming has been prefigured and diminished by an array of pop cultural predecessors, and his ghoulish charisma dwindles to tolerable eccentricity in an era incapable of astonishment.

I try not to draw too heavily on those types of influences, because then you’re just trying to emulate something as opposed to creating something new … I might like to draw a certain feeling or flavor out of an older movie, but I’m not trying to make a Xerox copy of it.

—Tim Burton (qtd. in Pizzello 56)