“A Duel of the Freaks” – The Monster Movie Madness of Tim Burton’s ‘Batman’ Films
It’s baffling just how easy it is to take a good movie for granted after watching it so many times that its success appears to have been inevitable. And while seeing your work become a household name seems like an artist’s greatest achievement, it’s a shame that this process can sometimes overshadow the weird and […]
It’s baffling just how easy it is to take a good movie for granted after watching it so many times that its success appears to have been inevitable. And while seeing your work become a household name seems like an artist’s greatest achievement, it’s a shame that this process can sometimes overshadow the weird and risky choices that made these projects so unique.
A great example of this is Tim Burton’s Batman duology – two wildly popular films that a lot of people forget were actually deeply strange productions which almost certainly couldn’t have been made today. And in honor of Batman’s 85th Anniversary Event, today I’d like to look back on Burton’s only foray into comic-book adaptations and reevaluate these films as I believe the director always intended: as expressionist monster movies.
It’s no secret that the character of Batman has always been influenced by the horror genre (his villains are literally kept in H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Asylum, for crying out loud), and though the Caped Crusader himself exhibits plenty of classic horror tropes in his presentation, everyone knows that it’s the freakish villains that make Batman stories so fascinating.
Tim Burton clearly thought so too. Hot off the success of Beetlejuice, the director was hired by Warner Bros. once he proposed a radically different take on the source material – likely the result of him only really being familiar with then-recent comics like The Dark Knight Returns and The Killing Joke. Partnering with screenwriter Sam Hamm (who would later pass on his writing duties to Warren Skaaren), Burton decided that focusing on the Bat’s colorful adversaries and the city of Gotham itself would make for a more entertaining experience than trying to get into the headspace of a larger-than-life character.
Rewatching the ’89 film (which I had the pleasure of seeing on the big screen for the first time thanks to the Anniversary Event), I realized something that child-me never noticed: both Batman and Bruce Wayne are absent for shockingly long stretches of the film’s runtime. Burton was clearly more interested in setting up a deeply atmospheric crime drama about a ruthless mobster who is both literally and figuratively pushed over the edge and turned into a freak of nature, with this reborn monster proceeding to lash out against the city that made him.
From Joker/Jack Napier’s acid-scarred hands emerging from toxic chemicals to the gimmicky deaths to which he subjects his victims, is clearly meant to be portraying an old-timey movie monster here. Even the character’s reveal at the underground surgeon is the stuff of genre legend, harkening back to classic horror movies about disfigured icons like (with Burton even shouting out French horror classic with Alicia Hunt’s tragic character). And while it wasn’t yet widely publicized that DC’s Joker was inspired by Conrad Veidt’s grinning protagonist in the 1928 expressionist drama , Burton had already made the connection long before this bit of comic-book trivia hit the mainstream.
