Beetlejuice

The movie is crammed with visual invention and snappy comedy. The afterlife is richly imagined as a macabre bureaucracy.

At the time, it seemed like a one-off oddity; now it seems like a Burton blueprint: surreal sensibility (check), nutty energy (check) and an acute feel for the pangs of the outsider (check).

Tonally, Beetlejuice resembles some of the other witty horror films of the era, like the Evil Dead and Nightmare On Elm Street series, but the fascination with model-building and heroic outsiders is pure Burton.