Entertainment
One of Tim Burton’s First Films Is Also a Great Twist on ‘Frankenstein’
There’s a certain kind of horror film you grow up with and never quite let go of — the ones with fog creeping over papier-mâché gravestones, with monsters who look confused about being alive in the first place. The old Universal cycle, the late-night AMC marathons, the days when your local channel would air The Bride of Frankenstein right after reruns of Kolchak: The Night Stalker. Tim Burton must have inhaled that stuff straight into his lungs, because when he started making his own films, you could feel all those classic shadows flickering behind him like someone holding a flashlight to an old bedroom wall.
And if you watched enough Tales from the Darkside or those early X-Files creature features where the monster wasn’t the villain so much as the problem nobody wanted to look at, Edward Scissorhands hits you like a memory you forgot you owned. What it really has is that same nervous, tender feeling you get from The Elephant Man — the way the film sits with someone who doesn’t fit and doesn’t apologize for it. Burton throws that sensibility into a suburb so bright it almost buzzes, and the whole place suddenly feels a little off, like the smile doesn’t match the eyes. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley would’ve cracked a smile.
The Monster on the Hill Was Never the Scariest Part
People forget this now, but there was a moment in the early ‘90s when Edward Scissorhands felt almost too gentle to be grouped in with horror-adjacent films. But if you peel back the candy colors and the Aqua Net haze, the Frankenstein bones are right there. The castle is a repurposed laboratory, the inventor is a kind of lonely father playing god with trembling hands, and Edward… well, Edward is the most sympathetic monster the genre’s seen since Boris Karloff’s creature opened his eyes for the first time.
What separates Burton’s version from the usual “man creates creature, regrets it” loop is that Edward isn’t wrong or dangerous or flawed — he’s unfinished. That’s a different kind of ache. Most Frankenstein stories hinge on hubris; this one hinges on opportunity stolen. The tragedy isn’t that he exists, it’s that he never gets to exist fully. And adding to the bittersweet nature of the film is horror legend Vincent Price, giving his last performance as Edward’s creator with the kind of gentle sadness that makes the whole film feel like a farewell wrapped in lace.
And when Edward walks into the town below, scissors held like a boy afraid to touch anything, he becomes the thing every Frankenstein creature becomes: a mirror. The neighbors project their fantasies, then their fears. They invent sins he never commits, then punish him for them. The real horror in Edward Scissorhands is the suburbia that smiles warmly until it decides it needs someone to bleed.
‘Frankenweenie’s Earnest Little Heartbeat
But Burton didn’t arrive at Edward out of nowhere. Long before the hair gel and the black-and-white striped suits, he made a little short called Frankenweenie. A kid resurrecting his dog Sparky sounds cute on paper, but the short has that unmistakable Burton grief around its edges — the kind that comes from a person who knows what it’s like to love something fragile and fear the world won’t play fair.
The short is practically a handwritten thank-you note to the original Frankenstein. You still get the lightning in the attic, and the little stitched-together creature who only wants to curl back up where he belonged, and the neighbors freak out right on cue the second anything looks unfamiliar. But underneath all the gags and the obvious callbacks, there’s this unexpectedly raw pulse to it — like Burton wasn’t making a homage so much as sorting through something he didn’t have language for yet.
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Duvall is a loving and open-minded mother in Burton’s 1984 short film.
The short’s clunky in spots, but the honesty keeps poking through anyway. Sparky never reads like a monster; he’s just a dog who got one more shot, and that small, almost ordinary truth hits harder than any of the visual tricks. Watching it now, you can feel Burton fumbling toward the thing he’d chase for years afterward: not the horror, not the spoof, but the soft, tired little heartbreak that sits inside anything we insist on calling a “monster.”
When Burton circled back to Frankenweenie years later, the stop-motion version didn’t feel like some grand artistic declaration — it felt like a guy finally admitting he’d been carrying something around for a long time and needed to get it out of his system. The feature-length Frankenweenie doesn’t feel “bigger” so much as it feels like Burton had more room to wander around the same wound he’d poked at in the short. There’s no big stylistic ta-da. It just settles into this quieter, tired sort of grief. Victor isn’t playing junior inventor anymore; he looks more like a kid who hasn’t figured out how to live with the empty space a pet leaves behind, so he does the one thing that makes sense to him, even if it’s absolutely the thing adults warn you not to touch.
‘Edward Scissorhands’ Is the Most Human Monster Tim Burton Ever Built
Edward Scissorhands is Burton’s masterpiece for a reason. He’s a Frankenstein creature who feels like he was assembled from empathy instead of sinew. His scissors — sharp, delicate, impractical — are a metaphor disguised as limbs. The hands he should’ve had are the life he never got to touch. When he trims hedges or ice sculptures, it isn’t spectacle, it’s a silent wish for connection.
The town never really gets a chance to understand him — not with all those pastel walls and stiff little routines they cling to like talismans. One minute they’re delighted by what he can do for them, the next they’re spooked by a drop of blood or a gesture they decide looks “wrong,” and from there it’s a straight slide into judgment. The ending lands the way all great monster stories land — not with justice, but with distance. Edward returns to the shadows, creating beauty for a world that only wants it as long as it doesn’t come with strings. It’s the classic Frankenstein ending dressed in Burton’s melancholy: the monster didn’t hurt the world, the world hurt him.
Tim Burton may be known for his stripes and spirals and all that candy-coated goth whimsy, but his real legacy sits with these two films. Frankenweenie is the spark. Edward Scissorhands is a fully grown creature. And together they prove that the best Frankenstein stories aren’t about monsters at all — they’re about love, and the terrible, inevitable truth that creation comes with loss baked right into the blueprint.
Edward Scissorhands is available to stream on Disney+ in the U.S.
- Release Date
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December 14, 1990
- Runtime
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105 minutes
- Producers
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Denise Di Novi