THE PECULIAR WORLD OF TIM BURTON

He grew up in the sun-drenched suburbs of Burbank, Calif., but much of Tim Burton’s childhood was lived in the shadows— quite literally. His parents had bricked up the two large windows in his bedroom, leaving just one small aperture high up the wall. The atmosphere was somewhat odd, his interior world very still. To peer out into the brighter world, young Burton had to clamber onto his desk.

“It was something to do with insulation,” recalls the filmmaker, now 58, “although we were living in Burbank—it’s like 80 degrees! Talk about being buried alive! I felt very Edgar Allan Poe even before I knew who Edgar Allan Poe was.”

Through his childhood years, Burton developed a deep passion for Poe, the author of such 19th-century gothic horrors as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” although his hunger was for the film adaptations that blossomed during the 1960s rather than for the written words. “My parents used to say that I watched monster movies before I could walk or talk,” he says. “I was always drawn to them and I never found them scary.” He loved the films of director Roger Corman and special-effects guru Ray Harryhausen. The actors Vincent Price and Bela Lugosi were his heroes. As a child, he wanted to be the man inside a Godzilla suit.

“I always felt an empathy with monsters,” he says. “In those early films, the monsters were the most emotive characters. The people were the scariest ones.” He adores

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