Tim Burton's oeuvre to date has included films as diverse as Bat Man (1989), Mars Attacks (1996), Planet of the Apes (2001) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005). A representative part of these works may be best described as Gothic ‘bricolage’ (Carver 2013, 119) or ‘parodies’ (Spooner 2017; Weinstock 2013) because, as Catherine Spooner notes, they are rewritings of pre-existing Gothic stories such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and the penny dreadful series The String of Pearls (1845–6), or Gothicised adaptations of European fairy tales (Ray 2010) and children's classics such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). While speaking to the hybridity of Gothic and its monsters, Burton's Gothic parodies, which include Corpse Bride (2005), Alice in Wonderland (2010) and Frankenweenie (2012), produce a reverberation of cultural antecedents, the playful interaction of which is, in itself, a source of entertainment for the spectator familiar with the tropes. Simultaneously, in playing with familiar themes and points of references, Burton's diversions from the original narratives signal the uncanny interplay of familiar/unfamiliar categories. As they defamiliarise recognisable char¬acters and interrogate well-known themes and storylines, the parodies undermine the ‘serious’ business of fear while drawing attention to the frightening aspects of ‘funny’.

The manifest combination of horror and laughter in Burton's works has prompted Jeffrey Weinstock to define them, rather than purely (and seriously) Gothic, as ‘Gothic’ and ‘Gothic-lite’, because in their deriva¬tive self-reflectiveness ‘the horror of the Gothic mode’ is somewhat diluted or ‘persistently undercut’ ‘through humor and sentimentality’ (Weinstock 2013, 26). Gothic has, however, always been ‘a form without an original, a series of citations and revivals’ (Spooner 2017, 53), its narratives persistently revolving around ‘fakery’ and ‘counterfeits’ (Hogle 2000).