Funny Peculiar

Tim Burton spills on his haunting, mysterious latest

hen Tim Burton, was pulling potential future projects from his Timbola, one caught his eye right away. he had received a packet filled with vintage photographs of children in macabre situations. one featured two children dressed head-to-toe in clown costumes. Another showing a young girl standing in front of a ruined building… with a round hole in her torso.

They were the kind of insidiously creepy images that feed your nightmares. “i found them haunting and mysterious,” Burton tells Empire. “They were intriguing —i wanted to find out more about them and their world.”

The pictures, as it turns out, had illustrated and inspired ransom riggs’ bestselling novel, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children, and had been sent to Burton in the hope that they would appeal. it worked like a charm.

The story centres on Jacob, who travels to a mysterious Welsh island following the murder of his grandfather, only to find the titular institution. run by miss Peregrine, “a weird mary Poppins-like character”, Jacob discovers it’s home to, well, a group of peculiar children. “each of them has something unique about them, some kind of ability. But not super powers,” explains Burton.

Burton admits that he was “worried about working with kids again”, but he’s surrounded his newcomers with a cracking cast of adults and older teens, including Asa Butterfield, seen here as Jacob alongside ella Purnell as emma, and eva Green as miss Peregrine. And with Jane Goldman on scripting duties, the foundations are in place for a truly unsettling kids’ flick. not so much funny ha ha, more… well, you get the drift.

Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiars is out