Sound And Vision: Tim Burton

In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: two music videos Tim Burton made for The Killers.

Tim Burton wears his influences on his sleeve. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which premieres this week at the Venice Film Festival, is the first time since Batman Returns that Tim Burton is making a sequel to his own movie. And this is the first time that an original concept by Burton is sequelized by himself. Recently, Burton has been playing the franchise-game, with films like Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. But even before that films like Mars Attacks, Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow aped the styles of predecessors and inspirations from Burton's childhood. For a director who's style became a brand, a lot of that brand rides on taking the influences of his youth and remixing them just enough to make it his own.

The same is true for the two music videos he made. Both are for The Killers, and both are hommages to certain styles and films. Bones (below), the first of the two music videos, features clips from B-movies from the fifties, most notably Creature From the Black Lagoon, and Jason and the Argonauts. The latter especially is a big inspiration, as the living skeletons, famously brought to life through Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion, are now replaced by Burtonesque CGI. It is a fun, irreverent video that places the skeletons in all sorts of lovey-dovey scenarios, including extended riffs on romantic scenes from Blake Edwards' 10 and Fred Zinnemann's From Here To Eternity.

Here With Me (also below) is more dour in tone and palate. This is not the Tim Burton of Corpse Bride, Mars Attacks or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but the Burton of Sweeney Todd at the helm. Like Sweeney Todd, Here With Me plays with a melodramatic horror-register, here referencing everything from the Giallo-genre to Santa Sangre, House of Wax, Psycho and Peeping Tom. The story of an obsessed loner, stalking an actress, and living a romantic life with her waxwork facsimile, eventually turns kinda sweet when they both turn out to be not fully human. It's a story of obsession, that fades in and out of reality and dream. It might be slightly creepy in its focus on the romantic obsessions of a loner, but it is also Tim Burton trying on a sort of style and story he rarely does: this is Burton getting serious and grim. Both videos together highlight several obsessions of the director, and the way in which he uses pastiche to his own gain. They might wear their references on their sleeve, but they are undeniably Burton videos.