Every director worth their salt has their own distinctive style. Quentin Tarantino makes ultraviolent, dialogue-driven genre movies. Christopher Nolan makes mind-bending actioners with IMAX cameras and meticulously crafted mathematical story structure. And Tim Burton makes gothic, expressionistic movies that deal with the supernatural and the macabre.
The characters in Burton’s movies tend to be extremely bizarre, typically played by Johnny Depp or Helena Bonham Carter, and there’s a zany line between good guys and bad guys. Burton has brought some seriously lovable weirdos to the big screen over the years, so here are the 10 weirdest characters from Tim Burton’s movies, ranked.
Ed Wood (Ed Wood)
The only character on this list who’s drawn from a real-life figure, Ed Wood was a filmmaker who directed B-movies with tacky special effects and on-the-nose performances, yet felt like he was an ingenious auteur in the mold of Kubrick or Godard or Kurosawa, creating cinematic masterworks that demanded to be dissected by scholars.
Johnny Depp’s portrait of Wood in Tim Burton’s black-and-white biopic is as wonderfully eccentric as one would expect from the writer, director, producer, and editor of Plan 9 from Outer Space.
The Mad Hatter (Alice In Wonderland)
Tim Burton kickstarted the trend of live-action remakes of Disney’s animated classics with his eerie, gothic, $1 billion-grossing Alice in Wonderland re-do. As always, he cast Johnny Depp in the lead role, which was the Mad Hatter in this version of the story, because Depp couldn’t play Alice.
Depp played the character as both a campy loon and a grumpy cynic, walking a curiouser and curiouser behavioral tightrope line between the two sides of the Hatter’s personality. The 2010 remake gave the character a suitably strange real name, too: Tarrant Hightopp.
Barnabas Collins (Dark Shadows)
In Tim Burton’s film adaptation of the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, Johnny Depp played the vampiric protagonist, Barnabas Collins. The movie itself was hardly a masterpiece, but its portrayal of Barnabas was a lot of fun.
He isn’t the kind of vampire who swoops through the night in search of blood to suck; he’s the kind of vampire who watches his toothbrush float around in the mirror when he’s brushing his teeth and his reflection is invisible.
Jack Skellington (The Nightmare Before Christmas)
Although The Nightmare Before Christmas was directed by Henry Selick, it was produced by Tim Burton, and Burton also wrote the story that the film was based on, so Jack Skellington is ultimately a Burton creation. And it doesn’t get much weirder than a stop-motion skeleton who wears a suit and spontaneously bursts into song and dance.
Jack is the “Pumpkin King” of Halloween Town before discovering Christmas Town and, along with it, all the joy and festivity that’s been missing from his life in Halloween Town.
Sweeney Todd (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber Of Fleet Street)
One might not immediately put Tim Burton and the musical genre together, but Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street — a period slasher about a barber who slits his customers’ throats with a straight razor and delivers them to the baker who bakes their corpses into pies — was right up his alley.
Stephen Sondheim wrote the stage musical that the movie was based on, but the Sweeney Todd character has been around since the penny dreadfuls of the Victorian era.
Emily (Corpse Bride)
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride is a tragic love story. Voiced by Helena Bonham Carter, the title character is extremely likable because she was willing to give up her love in exchange for the happiness of others.
However, as a zombie who rises from her grave when she overhears a man nervously rehearsing his wedding vows, and assumes he’s marrying her, she’s certainly peculiar.
Willy Wonka (Charlie And The Chocolate Factory)
Gene Wilder played a warm and lovable version of Willy Wonka in Mel Stuart’s original film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but Johnny Depp’s take on the character was decidedly zanier and more alienating in Tim Burton’s re-adaptation.
Wonka is a reclusive businessman who invites children into his factory via a marketing gimmick, then lets them get picked off one by one as he turns out to be determining his heir. He’s super weird, and it was refreshing to see Burton’s film reflect that.
The Penguin (Batman Returns)
The Penguin was not created by Tim Burton. He’s a staple of the DC Comics rogues gallery who, like Batman himself, was created by Bill Finger and Bob Kane. But Burton did bring the character to life in a very unique way in Batman Returns.
Although Dustin Hoffman was the first choice for the role and dozens of actors were offered the part after Hoffman turned it down, Danny DeVito turned out to be the perfect casting choice for this incarnation of the character. Oswald Cobblepot has legions of penguin minions, and identifies himself as a penguin. Burton encouraged DeVito to lean into the bizarreness, and DeVito gladly obliged.
Edward Scissorhands (Edward Scissorhands)
Just because a character is weird doesn’t mean they don’t have a heart of gold. For all intents and purposes, Edward Scissorhands is a lovely and well-meaning guy. But having hands made of scissors has made him an outcast in the colorful suburban community he occupies.
The character was inspired by a picture that Tim Burton drew as a child. He saw the tragedy in a man who just wants to have friends and fit in, yet has blades sticking out of his hands.
Betelgeuse (Beetlejuice)
Michael Keaton has said that Betelgeuse is his favorite of all the characters he’s played, and that shows in his performance. He clearly had a boatload of fun every day of shooting Beetlejuice. The titular character is a kind of poltergeist for hire who helps a recently deceased couple to haunt their old house when a new family moves in. However, he turns out to have some disturbing ulterior motives.
Betelgeuse was way more sinister in early drafts of the script, but the more comedic form he took when Keaton played him is still delightfully unusual.