Many Hollywood directors claim to have a unique style, but few have it quite like Tim Burton. Known for his dark and beautiful filmmaking techniques, the eccentric director has helmed classics like Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands and created The Nightmare Before Christmas , and now he's got another new movie, it's his most "Tim Burton-esque" movie in years. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children has the fantasy look that Burton fans crave, but where did the film come from? Is Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children based on a real location?
Unlike many of Burton's works, this film is not based on one of his own original ideas. Instead, it comes from the book of the same name by author Ransom Riggs. The book tells the story of a Welsh orphanage run by, you guessed it, Miss Peregrine. But this is no ordinary orphanage, it is home to "wonders" - children with supernatural abilities. One child has an extra mouth on the back of his head for eating; another can control bees; and yet another has thermokinetic abilities. Obviously, no such people exist in the world, so they have no real home, but the story ideas still come from the real world.
The book was inspired by Riggs' collection of vintage photographs. The author was interested in weird and mysterious pictures from the past, and after initially planning to put them in a picture book, he eventually decided to weave a story around them - a story that became The Story of Miss Peregrine . About four dozen vintage photographs appear in the book and are integrated into the story, and they are truly strange...and often disturbing.
One photo shows a clown face painted on the back of someone's bald head; the crease in their neck resembles a mouth (sound familiar?). Other pieces feature crystal balls, mysterious shadow figures and a boy's face superimposed on a dog. As to where these photos originally came from, or why they exist, these questions remain unanswered. "Because the photos are anonymous and long removed from the context in which they might be interpreted, I have no more idea of what they are about than my readers do," Riggs wrote in The Huffington Post in 2011. Each photo is a disturbing little mystery - I love that. "
There's no real home for special children here like in Miss Peregrine , but its strange residents are certainly influenced by real mysterious children from the past. Fans will never know what happened in the photos that inspired the book, but with a little imagination, it's not hard to believe they were all taken at a very special orphanage in Wales.
Image: 20th Century Fox; Weird Books
