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said. “But I thought there was something
a bit more weird and scary about
a more simple helmet. This riveted simplicity
felt kind of cultish to me.”
The Hollows
These creatures are the biggest threat
to Peculiars, and all the more menacing
because they are invisible to most everyone.
In his sketch, Mr. Burton incorporated
mouth tentacles and other traits
described in the novel but also put his
stamp on this lanky figure, which could
be at home in his films “The Nightmare
Before Christmas” or “Corpse Bride.”
“Originally, we were doing things that
felt too much like monsters,” he said. “I
got back to the idea that they should
have a human quality. That made it feel
more like a folk tale kind of children’s
horror story. So I kept clothes on them
so they had a human aspect to them.”
Icky Treat: Eyeball Feast
To become more humanlike, Barron
must eat human eyeballs. In one scene,
he and other former Hollows enjoy an
eyeball feast. It’s a grisly, but also a kind
of funny, visual set piece that gets at the
children’s nightmare spirit of the novel.
Mr. Burton’s simple watercolor drawing
helped realize this moment. And
while he doesn’t make as many storyboards
for his movies as he used to, they
were necessary in this case.
“We had to do this scene in a montage
kind of a way,” Mr. Burton said, “so it is
one sequence that helped to storyboard.”
In the end, though the feast’s vibe is lifted
from in the book, he said, “it’s not as
literal as what we ended up with.”
In Miss Peregrine‘s Home For Peculiar
Children, eagle-eyed viewers will notice
that Tim Burton appears on-screen for a
split second during the film‘s boardwalkset
finale, so when I recently had the chance
to sit down with the director during the
movie‘s press day, I took the opportunity
to ask him about it. Burton explained
that he didn‘t have much of a choice in
the matter, because the production was
not only short on budget, but didn‘t have
a crew available and didn‘t even have official
permission to shoot in the location:
CAESAR 07/2020
Photos: Jay Maidment/20th Century Fox; Tim Burton