From Beetlejuice to Sleepy Hollow, Tim Burton is renowned for the spooky atmosphere of his films, and he’s created some truly terrifying scenes to keep his audience up at night. Burton’s movies have an unmistakably quirky, gothic visual style that immediately identifies them as his work. Just like there’s no mistaking a Tarantino movie or a Lynch movie, there’s no mistaking a Burton movie. Even when he takes on a seemingly child-friendly property like Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Burton can’t resist including some ghoulish frights.
Sometimes, the scariest thing about a Burton movie is how bad it is, like his remake of Planet of the Apes that ends with apes on motorcycles at an ape version of the Lincoln Memorial. But the duds are few and far between; for the most part, Burton has directed macabre masterpieces like Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands. From the monstrous villains in his Batman movies to the grisly barbershop murders of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Burton has taken plenty of opportunities to terrify his audience with scary scenes.
Related
10 Movies Tim Burton Would Be Perfect For After Beetlejuice 2
Tim Burton is known for his dark, gothic visuals, and there are several movies that vision would be a perfect match for after Beetlejuice 2.
10 Large Marge’s Form Reveal
Pee-wee’s Big Adventure
Based on the gothic horror aesthetic that became his signature style, it might seem strange that Burton’s directorial career began with the kid-friendly caper Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, but everyone has to start somewhere – and Burton included plenty of his usual terror. The scariest moment in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure is the unnerving reveal of ghostly truck driver Large Marge’s true form. With huge, bulging, unmoving eyes, Large Marge’s form reveal is an image that’s hard to shake.
9 The Martians Kill Congress
Mars Attacks!
For the most part, Burton’s sci-fi comedy Mars Attacks!, based on the Topps trading card series of the same name, is a campy, lighthearted movie. But it has its fair share of Burton’s signature scares. In one unnerving sequence, the Martians attack Congress and liquefy a room full of politicians in a second. This scene shows just how outmatched Earth is against its Martian overlords. At the pull of a trigger, the Martians can reduce a crowd of people’s skeletons to dust.
8 The Witch’s Jump Scare
Sleepy Hollow
Jump scares are an easy but effective way to frighten an audience. In Sleepy Hollow, when Ichabod Crane and Young Masbeth go to the woods to visit a witch, they find her with a veil over her face. She decapitates a live bat, then chains herself to a table and performs a dangerous spell. There are a few seconds of silence before the witch jumps out with a horrific zombie-like appearance with no eyeballs, speaking in tongues. This is a really powerful jump scare, because it’s totally unexpected.
7 Max Shreck Pushes Selina Kyle Out Of A Window
Batman Returns
Batman Returns is the closest Batman has come to starring in a Christmas movie, but it’s also the closest he’s come to starring in a horror film. The main villains of the sequel are Catwoman and the Penguin, but the big bad is business tycoon Max Schreck. In one of the film’s earliest scenes, Burton sets the tone nice and dark by having a deranged Schreck push Selina Kyle out of a window. Thankfully, she’s saved by some seemingly supernatural cats, which turns her into Catwoman.
6 The Haunted Dinner
Beetlejuice
Throughout Beetlejuice, Burton gets a lot of laughs out of the Maitlands’ feeble attempts to haunt the Deetzes. But the haunting finally becomes scary in the climactic dinner scene when the Deetzes and their guests are attacked by their own food. The shrimp jumps out of the bowl and grabs them. The scariest movie moments take something universally recognizable and mundane, like taking a shower, and make them terrifying, like having Norman Bates come in with a knife. Beetlejuice managed to make dinner scary.
5 The Headless Horseman Visits The Killian Family
Sleepy Hollow
As the Headless Horseman makes his rounds, there are plenty of disturbing murder scenes in Sleepy Hollow, but the scariest of all is when the Horseman rides to the farm of the Killian family. After he slays Killian, Killian’s wife Beth takes their son Thomas down to the cellar. The Horseman marches through the house, Killian’s severed head in hand, and decapitates Beth. Burton then takes Thomas’ frightened perspective in the cellar as his mother’s head rolls over and locks eyes with him through the floorboards. Putting the audience in an orphaned child’s shoes makes this scene even scarier.
4 The Penguin Bites A Guy’s Nose
Batman Returns
The Penguin’s story arc in Batman Returns involves running for office, and this is no ordinary political campaign. When Schreck introduces the Penguin to his staff of advisors, the first thing the Penguin does is grab one of them and take a bite out of his nose. Danny DeVito’s portrayal of the Penguin is truly monstrous – he’s as creepy as any incarnation of Dracula or the Wolf Man – and this disturbing out-of-left-field sequence proves it.
3 Willy Wonka’s Boat Ride
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The trippy boat ride from the original Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory often tops lists of the scariest moments from otherwise family-friendly movies. Burton maintained that spirit when he remade the film under Roald Dahl’s original title, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Burton’s version of Wonka’s boat ride is every bit as surreal and unsettling as the scene from the original Mel Stuart film.
2 Judge Turpin’s Death
Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
There are a lot of gory murders in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, but the way Burton builds up the tension to Judge Turpin’s death is particularly masterful. Todd has been hiding his identity as Benjamin Barker while vowing revenge against Turpin for what he did to his wife. As soon as Turpin sits down in Todd’s chair, he puts two and two together. Just as Turpin utters Barker’s name, Todd brings the straight razor down and slices his throat. With screeching violins on the soundtrack and blood splashed on the camera, this is a horrifying sequence.
1 The Joker’s Transformation
Batman
By far the scariest sequence in any Tim Burton movie is when the Joker is born in his original Batman film. After falling into a vat of chemicals, Jack Napier is reconstructed by an underground plastic surgeon to have green hair, red lips, and white skin. The Joker asks the frightened surgeon for a mirror, then smashes the mirror and laughs hysterically upon seeing his new look. The surgeon is left in a stunned silence as the Joker stands and staggers out of the room.
The fact that Burton obscures the Joker throughout the whole scene, forcing the audience to use their imagination, makes this scene so much more effective. Any lingering memory of the campy days of Adam West was eradicated by Tim Burton’s sinister vision of the Dark Knight mythos, and this is the moment that truly ushered in a new era of Batman’s on-screen adventures.
