Tim Burton’s 5 Favorite Movies Reveal Exactly Where His Strange Style Came From

Having begun his cinema career as an animator for Disney, Tim Burton’s 1985 feature debut as a director, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, instantly made him one of the most distinctive and exciting filmmakers of the day. Its immense box office success was followed by a string of equally original and visually striking blockbusters, including Beetlejuice, Batman and Batman Returns, Edward Scissorhands, and Sleepy Hollow (which netted its star Martin Landau an Academy Award). 

In more recent decades, he has continued to build a reputation as a creator of both intriguing niche dramas (Big Fish, Big Eyes) and immense blockbusters (Alice in Wonderland, Sweeney Todd), as well as eye-catching animations, including his work on the endlessly popular Nightmare Before Christmas and the Oscar-nominated Corpse Bride. Throughout it all, and across all forms and genres, Burton has worked in his own macabre sense of humor and his signature gothic style—a style whose roots can be easily understood when you explore his own favorite movies. 

In a 2010 interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Burton was asked to pick his five favorite films of all time. He chose a quintet of titles—all from the 1960s and ‘70s—that are as surprising as they are revealing about how this most creative of minds brings his own movies to the big screen. 

1. Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) 
2. The Wicker Man (1974) 
3. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
4. The War of the Gargantuas (1970)
5. The Omega Man (1971) 

Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) 

Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula is often said to be the most (if not one of the most) frequently filmed literary characters in movie history. Not all of his big-screen outings are quite as successful as others, however, and unfortunately Hammer Horror’s Dracula A.D. 1972 is one of the least well-received films about this iconic character. 

Relocating the eponymous count to contemporary 1970s London, the film was intended as something of a reboot of Hammer’s Dracula series, and reunited the studio’s longtime co-stars Christopher Lee (as Dracula) and Peter Cushing (as Van Helsing). The film’s campy juxtaposition of 19th-century Europe and swinging ‘70s London might not have landed too well with the critics or audiences at the time (nor, for that matter, with Christopher Lee, who labeled it “aesthetically depressing”), but it nevertheless made Burton’s list. “I think it was Hammer on the decline and they thought, ‘Hey, let’s get hip,’ which was a mistake,” he explained. “But I enjoy mistakes sometimes.”

The Wicker Man (1974) 

After an arresting and scene-stealing cameo as the burgomaster in 1999’s Sleepy Hollow, Christopher Lee went on to become something of a frequent collaborator of Burton’s, working with him a total of five times before his death in 2015 at the age of 93. Burton had long admired his work, and the pair became good friends off screen too; perhaps understandably, he chose another of Lee’s films (and a far more admired one, at that) as another of his favorites. 

One of the most acclaimed folk horror movies of all time, The Wicker Man tells the story of a devout Christian police officer (played by future Equalizer star Edward Woodward) who visits a remote Scottish island, overseen by Lee’s Lord Summerisle, to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. What he discovers on the island unfolds in a series of creepy and increasingly uneasy events before the film’s infamously grim conclusion. “It’s like a weird dream,” Burton explained of the film. “Things are quite normal on the surface, but underneath they’re not quite what they seem.”

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

Burton has made a handful of his own forays into stop-motion animation, including creating and producing The Nightmare Before Christmas—which was based on a poem he had written while working at Disney in the 1980s—and earning Best Animated Feature Oscar nominations for both Corpse Bride and the 2012 feature-length adaptation of his own earlier 1984 short Frankenweenie. Given his interest and experience in the genre, it’s perhaps unsurprising that he chose one of stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen’s movies as one of his all-time favorites. 

1973’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad features the eponymous legendary sailor (Barbarella star John Phillip Law) seeking the magical Fountain of Destiny, and racing against a malevolent sorcerer named Koura (played by future Doctor Who Tom Baker) to find it. A box office smash at the time of its release, Sinbad features some of Harryhausen’s most impressive animated work, including a monstrous winged homunculus and a six-armed statue of Kali. “In his characters—even the things that had no character,” Burton explained, “you could feel an artist at work there. […]taking an inanimate object and having it come to life.”

The War of the Gargantuas (1970)

“I grew up watching Japanese science fiction movies and I particularly (unlike most hardcore film people) like dubbed movies,” Burton explained of a film he singled out as one of his favorites. The War of the Gargantuas is a 1966 Japanese kaiju film (released in 1970 in the U.S.) that tells of two gigantic ape-like Frankenstein creatures, one green (named Gaira) and the other brown (named Sanda), that wreak havoc around Tokyo Bay.

The film might not be as well-remembered as other Japanese creature features, like Godzilla, but it was the duo of warring monsters—and the sheer fun of it all—that made this particular title stick out for Burton, who would go on to explore similar monster-with-a-heart themes in many of his movies. “There’s a beauty to these films, the Japanese character designs,” he explained. “There’s a human kind of quality to these things, which I love. Monsters were always the most soulful characters.”

The Omega Man (1971) 

The Omega Man tells the dystopian story of the survivor of a global biological warfare pandemic, who must survive amid bands of murderous mutants who have somehow survived the plague—characters which Burton admired for being “played by real people,” lending them a creepy realism on screen. The film’s star Charlton Heston would go on to have an uncredited cameo role as an aged simian in Burton’s own adaptation of The Planet of the Apes in 2001, which not only played fun service to the original movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s, but gave Burton the chance to work with an actor he had long admired as, he joked, “the greatest bad actor of all time.”