The Films of Tim Burton

Most Tim Burton films are huge box-office successes, and several are already classics. The director’s mysterious and eccentric public persona attracts a lot of attention, while the films themselves have been somewhat overlooked. Here, Alison McMahan redresses this imbalance through a close analysis of Burton’s key films (Beetiejuice, Ed Wood, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Sleepy Hollow) and their place within the filmmaking industry. She argues that Burton has been a crucial figure behind many of the transformations taking place in horror, fantasy, and science fiction films over the last two decades. McMahan also demonstrates how Burton’s own work draws on a huge range of artistic influences: the films of Georges Melies, surrealism, installation art, computer games, and many more. The Films of Tim Burton is the most in-depth analysis so far of the work of this unusual filmmaker – a director who has shown repeatedly that it is possible to reject mainstream Hollywood contentions while maintaining critical popularity and commercial success.

Author Biography

Alison McMahan is a Mellon Fellow in Visual Culture at Vassar College. From 1997 to 2001 she ran the MA program in film and television studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she taught early cinema and new media. She has published widely on early cinema and has carried out research for documentaries such as The Lost Garden: The Life and Work of Alice Guy Blache (1995, National Film Board of Canada) and for the Emmy-award winning Into the Light (‘State of the Arts’ series, New Jersey Network, 1995). She was interviewed as an early cinema expert for the documentary Reel Models: The Women of Early Film which first aired on the American Movie Classics Channel in 2000.