Tim Burton and the Gothic Allure

I like dark things, anyone who knows me well enough will immediately describe me as being Goth. I have over the years figured out that the meaning of Goth in the pop culture context and the high art context have actually begun to blend for me. I simultaneously love architecture with high arks, stained glass windows, and dark make-up, the feel of reading the Castle of Otranto, and the sound of Nine Inch Nails. To me the idea of Goth encompasses the old frightening castles, Gothic churches, and the paranormal creatures that might reside there, as well as a dark outlook on life, pessimistic and somewhat twisted. I identify with these ideas because I like the idea of living on the fringe, and I like the idea of the unexplainable and mysterious, but also because I've lived a very melancholy and lonely life. Being an only child in my opinion has more disadvantages than perks, at least this has been my experience. I think that part of the reason why I have secluded myself into a dark corner with nothing but a book and my imagination was because since I did not have a sibling to interact with I was not able to learn the proper social interactions of a playground. Over the years after being thrown to the wolves I came to the conclusion that in my case it was probably better to stay hidden away with my ghosts, cob webs and spiders, than to venture out into the complicated world outside of my books. I have always been fascinated by shadows and what could lurk behind them, and what better place to find them than in strange castles, tucked away behind forests and high mountains. Castles are behemoths filled with dark secrets that I wanted to figure out. Gothic fashion is interesting to me because I see it in a way a sort of dress up that sucks you into a fantastical world where vampires, werewolves, and ghosts dwell. I have submerge myself in this Gothic culture in many different senses and it has had an affect on my writing, and the kind of stories I write. However, my love of Gothic culture did not begin with books, but with with Tim Burton.

When I was young I fell in love with Tim Burton's rendition of Batman and his movie Edward Scissorhands. Batman from the cartoons had always been a dark melancholy figure who fought for justice and as someone who was often picked on at school I appreciated what he did, and wished I could do it myself. Tim Burton glamorized Batman even more for me by bringing his dark world to life, a world that was caught between the forties and the modern day. I wanted to live in this world where the old and the new merged, where anything seemed possible. I think that the main attraction for me in Tim Burton films was that he could make me believe that anything could be possible in the world. Despite the fact that his worlds looked cartoonish, even to the special effects standards of his day, his ideas and his characters seemed real, and I could believe in them because I could believe in their stories. It would be difficult to deny that Johnny Depp was probably
my first actor crush as a child. His performance as Edward Scissorhands moved me to the point of tears
because I felt the sadness of the young man he portrayed, who had been left incomplete and abandoned without the love of his creator/father. I didn't ever feel like I lacked love because my parents have always been very nurturing, but I did many times feel the same as he did, as if I had come down from my dark castle to a world I didn't quite understand, where people wanted to use me for their own ends, and where I would only be a piece of entertainment until the novelty of meeting me passed. Tim Burton just seemed to speak to me in my formative years. I fell in love with so many of his characters. For a very long time I dreamed of being Lydia, Winona Ryder's character in Beetlejuice, and I would have to say that it was thanks to characters like her that I began to build my own worlds in my head. From my early childhood I liked the idea of using my imagination and so I created imagery friends with backgrounds and stories to play with. When I was a little girl I could not live in Lydia's dark world, but as I got older I began to put down stories on paper, and to change my attire as well. I began to explore the meaning of the word Goth and became familiar with all its uses and meanings, and took what I could and made it my own.

I always had my nose stuck in a book but I was not familiar with the works of writers like Charlotte Bronte, or Bram Stoker. I soon widened my research of the Gothic to include literature and found Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, as well as those previously mentioned, and from then on I would move on to things like the dark fantasy novels, such as The Tithe by Holly Black, and the tales of Clive Barker. I've never written a ghost story, or a mystery of any sort, but my stories often have a sense of melancholy, and many of my early stories end with tragedy and death. The Gothic mystery of Northanger Abbey  and the "absurdist" worlds of Tim Burton have filled my imagination and to this day they inspire me. One of my goals is to begin to write literature that involves that eerie feel that I get from reading those old Gothic classics, but I would also like to write more modern stories that involved gore, and blood, and vampires, trying to near the pop culture ideal of what Gothic is today. Nevertheless, my ultimate goal is to somehow find the middle ground in writing, like I have in my life style, to write a modern tale of the Gothic that encompasses all the elements of the early Gothic novel, and the quirky creepiness of a Tim Burton film.