Tim Burton is not the kind of person that belongs in a press junket. The morbidly funny goth prince of cinema has the air of a man who would rather gnaw off his arm than be paraded in front of journalists and influencers asking about his creative process. As he tells Review, the main reason he makes art is because “sometimes it’s hard for me to put thoughts or things into words”. One imagines this is his personal form of hell.

Pity, then, that he has a habit of making hits. One that began in 1985 with Pee Wee’s Big Adventure and unfurled in a streak of studio bangers rivalled by few directors: Beetlejuice, Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Batman Returns, Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! Then came his animated works – The Nightmare Before Christmas (which he did not direct, but conceived and produced) and Corpse Bride. All stitched together by hollow-eyed heroes and off-kilter fairytales, Burton’s worlds rewired pop culture’s visual language – and the way teenagers doodled in their notebooks. There’s a word for it: Burtonesque.

And yet, for all his success, Burton still carries himself like an outsider. Born in the blinding suburbs of Burbank, California in 1958, he spent his childhood milling around graveyards. “I grew up near a cemetery and used to play in it,” he says. “So even though California is very bright and light, I was always drawn to a darker side of it.” A self-professed loner, he found kinship in patron saints of the macabre like Vincent Price – who would later narrate Burton’s early short film Vincent – and Edgar Allan Poe. A sense of otherness was instilled early and never quite left.

That outsider’s vantage has always defined his style. Burton’s films are attuned to a child’s perspective – though he once snorted at the ’90s nostrum about “tapping into your inner child” as “yuppie bullshit”. He still bristles at the phrase, but he’s softened a bit: “It depends how you phrase it. When people say ‘tap into your inner child’ that sort of puts you in a category and stunts your growth. As an artist it’s worth retaining those feelings of things being new. When you’re a child you see things as strange and different for the first time. I think that’s important.”

Wednesday Addams, the child of woe

By 2019, with 17 feature films behind him, the system had started to feel airless. His live-action Dumbo flopped, and Burton was quietly considering retirement. “That all happened right around Covid. It put a weird sort of pall onto everything. I spent a lot of time inside my own mind during that period of time. I think a lot of people did.”

Then came the child of woe.

Screenwriting duo Alfred Gough and Miles Millar – best known for turning Superman into a teenager in Smallville — had reframed Wednesday Addams as a 16-year-old outsider and written the scripts with one director in mind. Told he’d never do television, they sent him the pages anyway.

“It really spoke to me,” Burton says. “I felt like it was written for me. It re-energised my love for a certain kind of character and a certain kind of way that I feel.” He doesn’t pretend to know exactly why he connected so strongly. “You can never predict it. But Wednesday is a character I agree with – about school, family, psychiatry, society.”

Burton was a natural choice to shepherd Charles Addams’ most deathly daughter into the streaming age. Addams, too, had spent his childhood haunting cemeteries and sketching mordant cartoons – first published in The New Yorker in 1932. “They spoke to me very early on,” Burton says. “I loved how he told the story in one picture. He’s East Coast, I was more West Coast suburban horror. There’s a similarity for sure.”

Gough and Millar, both fathers of two teenage daughters, saw Wednesday as their chance to read the room. “I think Wednesday is somebody who speaks her mind in a world where everybody feels censored and can’t say what they feel,” says Millar. “She is unapologetically smart, well read and she’s analog.” So, the kids want to be offline? “Yes. But not really,” Millar says. “I do think there are kids who wish they could be analog, and admire it.”

Production began during the pandemic. Casting was done over Zoom – anathema to most directors, but oddly comforting for this one. At a talk at NIDA in Sydney, Burton told the crowd the remote process actually helped. “I’m super nervous to meet people. So doing a Zoom meeting was easier because when I meet people I’m not so detached. I can see them without being nervous in the room.” He knew immediately that Jenna Ortega was right for the role: “She was like a silent movie actor. She did this stare and I knew.”

Ortega, like her character, is a bit of an outlier in Hollywood. Glamorous, yes – but she doesn’t play ball. There’s none of the phony exuberance you might expect from a Disney alum. To prepare, she devoured silent cinema and gothic fiction, took cello lessons twice a week, and soundtracked her days with Mahler and Shostakovich. For Wednesday’s now-iconic dance, she borrowed from Denis Lavant’s finale in Claire Denis’ Beau Travail. “It doesn’t have to be a fully choreographed number,” Ortega tells Review. “I don’t have to be going 100 per cent all the time. Which is a little off-putting, and weird.”

Burton fed her references – Dead of Night, “obviously” The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Mary Shelley’s writing, original Addams Family strips. “I find inspiration everywhere but with someone like Wednesday and because there’s so much history there and we have so much to go off, it’s nice to just continue pulling back the layers and getting deeper into those pre-existing goods.”

Netflix’s most-watched English-language series

To say Wednesday was a hit is an understatement. When it premiered in 2022, it became Netflix’s most-watched English-language series ever. It spent 20 weeks in the Global Top 10, racked up 50 nominations across the Emmys, Golden Globes and SAG Awards – and won 17.

Its cultural footprint was immediate. Ortega’s dance sequence went viral, sparking millions of TikTok recreations set to Lady Gaga’s Bloody Mary – boosting the song’s streams by 1800 per cent and prompting Gaga to cameo in season two. The Cramps’ Goo Goo Muck, a 40-year-old track used in the series, saw a 5000 per cent spike. MAC’s Nightmoth lipstick – Ortega’s on-screen shade – sold out. Halloween was overtaken by Peter Pan collars and twin plaits.

In Seoul, thousands packed a downtown mall just to see the cast. Many had only a vague idea of the Addams Family prior to the show, despite South Korea producing its own gothic sitcom spin-off, Hello Franceska, in the mid-2000s. For these fans, the draw was the world itself – spooky, stylish and just off-centre enough. And of course, Wednesday.

“I liked the idea of having all these outcast, oddball characters together in one place. Wednesday is my favourite character. She comes off as this dark person, but you can tell she’s actually very warm and soft on the inside,” 18-year-old Jules told Review. Another fan, 23-year-old Siwar, said: “I like that she’s cold – but at the same time, she’s kind and friendly. She loves her friends and does her best to defend them.”

In Sydney, thousands descended on Cockatoo Island for a Wednesday takeover. Lace, leather, petticoats and pigtails. What struck most was how well behaved everyone was. Fan culture can sometimes veer towards the extreme, but this crowd was different. Quiet, thoughtful, attuned to outsiderness. As one young man in a fur waistcoat and mohawk told Review, Wednesday “shows you that even if you’re an outcast, you can have your found family”.

It is perhaps the neatest summation of Burton’s enduring appeal: his films invite the outcast to be looked at, and to look back.

“The funny thing is when growing up, I always felt I’d exorcise that demon out of me. But the thing is, even if you have like family, success, anything, you always kind of feel that way,” Burton says. “It never leaves you. I expect that feeling will last till the end of days for me.”

In the same way Vincent Price films once gave him a darkness that made sense of the world, Burton’s own films have become an entry point for young people – a gateway to stranger, artier fare. Was this intentional, a way of passing on what was given to him? Not exactly. “I never really thought about it. But when I have been lucky enough to connect, it always touches me,” he says.

“I never knew that I was going to direct films or do anything. I just like doing things from my heart, so if it connected with anybody that means a lot to me. But I can never predict that and I never went out of my way to try to do that.

“Sometimes it’s hard for me to put thoughts or things into words. So for me [making art] is a way to get those abstract feelings out. You know, doing a drawing or making a film is a kind of strange therapeutic process. It’s kind of an expensive form of therapy, but it’s therapy nonetheless.”

Perhaps that’s the symmetry with Wednesday. She’s an outcast among outcasts who insists on saying the unsayable; he’s an artist who draws pictures when words fail. If Wednesday re-energised him, it wasn’t because the world finally understood him, but because he recognised himself.

“Even though I’m a man,” he says, “I feel like Wednesday.”

Wednesday season 2 part 2 arrives on Netflix on September 3.