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A sweetly dead young couple, stuck haunting their own house, hire a raunchy "bio-exorcist" to scare off the living — say his name three times and chaos answers. It's a 1988 film, but between the VHS shelf, October cable reruns, and the Saturday-morning cartoon, Beetlejuice belonged to 90s kids too.
Tim Burton's warmest film: a dying father who has always told his life as a series of tall tales — a giant, a witch who shows your death in her eye, a perfect hidden town called Spectre — and the grown son trying to sort truth from myth before it's too late. Ewan McGregor plays the young father in the fables, Albert Finney the old man telling them.
Tim Burton and Johnny Depp's uncanny riff on Roald Dahl arrived in 2005 as the alternative to Gene Wilder's 1971 warmth — pale, lush, and polarizing in the way only Burton films manage. The Dahl estate approved wholeheartedly; audiences argued about it all summer.
Tim Burton's $80 million love letter to a gory 1962 trading-card set: cackling bug-eyed Martians vaporizing Jack Nicholson, Pierce Brosnan, and half of Hollywood — until Slim Whitman's yodeling makes their heads explode. Five months after Independence Day played it straight, this played it very, very weird.
The stop-motion marvel Tim Burton conceived — and Henry Selick directed — where the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town kidnaps Christmas. Danny Elfman wrote the songs and sang Jack himself. Disney thought it too dark for its own label in 1993; a decade later Jack's face was a mall uniform.
The dark-eyed patron saint of Gen X — Beetlejuice's goth kid, Heathers' reluctant mean girl, Reality Bites' adrift twentysomething. From 1988 to 1999 Winona Ryder was in seemingly every movie that mattered to anyone under 30, collecting two Oscar nominations along the way.