Though exactly 25 years have passed since Edward Scissorhands debuted on December 7, 1990, it's hard to forget those opening scenes: manicured lawns and pastel paint, watched over by the creepiest black brick castle your pre-teen mind could dream up.

The character of Edward Scissorhands formed in Tim Burton’s mind many years prior to its filming, and he’d already shot Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Beetlejuice and Batman before the beloved Edward — played by Johnny Depp in a role that ostensibly put him back on the movies map — got to the screen.

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For a few decades now, Burton has slowly aligned himself –- or perhaps we've just slowly aligned with him — to a place of preeminent pomp in all things otherworldly. While it’s easy to argue that Guillermo Del Toro is the moment's King of Macabre, it’s Burton who comes from a childlike place of wonder and awe at a world where fitting in is harder than etching oneself out.

Edward Scissorhands was indicative of a time, the beginning of an era even, in which it became more acceptable to let our freak flag fly. It’s evident in pockets of culture today, like Ryan Murphy's television creations Glee and American Horror Story or Lady Gaga's meat dresses and songs that champion otherness.

What are the Guardians of the Galaxy if not absurd misfits whose otherness is celebrated? Or all superheroes for that matter?

Though Edward wasn’t fully able to assimilate and was chased away to his tower by the townspeople, for a moment the outcast was part of the in-crowd, which perhaps was the ushering in of the modern-day mainstreaming of nerds and geeks, cosplayers and emo rockers.

It was out of otherness that Edward was born, actually. Burton and screenwriter Caroline Thompson were both in an odd place during 1985. Burton had just finished Pee Wee and was looking for another project, one that he most likely wanted to inject a bit more of what we all now know and love from the creepy visionary.

And Thompson, a fledgling writer who happened to be signed to the same agency had one script optioned that didn’t end up getting made.

“My agent didn’t quite know what to do with me,” says Thompson, who went on to write both The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride for Burton. “My sensibilities were kind of odd. And Tim’s agent didn’t know what to do with him for the same reasons — so they introduced us.”

Caroline Thompson, screenwriter of "Edward Scissorhands." Image: Barry King/WireImage

Like a classic meet-cute — except with two storytellers who prefer cemeteries to long beach walks — the two got along instantly. Not long after, one night at a bar in Santa Monica, Burton told Thompson about this drawing he made in high school of a boy with scissors for hands. Thompson never did see that drawing, but she knew exactly what to do with that image.

Thompson went home and took about three weeks to write a prose version of the story that would eventually become the screenplay for Edward Scissorhands.

“Tim and I, we love things that are really sad but that are really beautiful,” says Thompson, who credits her entire career to Burton. “I always loved horror movies because they made me cry. The Swamp Thing carrying his beloved toward the swamp at the end of the movie made me weep. Tim and I [talked about feeling] like the Hunchback of Notre Dame; it’s this feeling that everything is both beautiful and scary at the same time. I think that’s the shared sensibility that comes out in Edward Scissorhands that we both tried to express through the character.”

In the same way that Lady Gaga has helped legions of teens feel more accepted when they press play on their iPhones, Edward helped make the story of the outsider resonate.

“It’s why that movie worked — and continues to work,” production designer Bo Welch told Mashable. “Everyone at some point in their lives has felt like they don’t fit, that their hands are in the way.”

Tim Burton, Winona Ryder and Johnny Depp at the 1990 premiere of "Edward Scissorhands" in Los Angeles. Image: Barry King/WireImage

The character of Edward was not only seminal in his sweet vulnerability and aesthetic that made children stare, but the film’s work in production design, costume creation and makeup were industry benchmarks (along with Burton’s Beetlejuice) for the “Tim Burton look.”

Welch, who began with Burton on Beetlejuice, is always wary of a filmmaker who approaches him for a project and asks for that “Edward Scissorhands look,” because he knows that it’s a sure way to get himself wrapped up in an unoriginal process.

“In many ways, [those first films with Tim] completely changed the way I looked at art direction because of Tim’s perspective and filmmaking techniques,” offers Welch. “Up until then, everybody was busy with recreating reality and letting the scenery sort of recede into the background so that the actors in the story could step forward and be told without the distraction of visuals. Everything was very literal and real.

"When I met Tim, it was like, ‘Forget all that. We’re in the business of expressing ideas and not just recreating reality.’”

And while Thompson isn’t in the habit of analyzing her own work, she’s been told over the years that she’s liberated the weird, that she was able to take the insides of someone and make it the outside. She’s often thought that if she had any dignity, she would have retired after making this (her first) film.

“I knew it even at the time,” she remembers, “that it was a perfect experience. Which is to say, everybody was making the same movie. You may not realize how rare that is, but it’s the rarest thing in Hollywood. It was a very strange sensibility for everyone to intuitively understand that. We were all walking this delicate line between the sweet and grotesque, the funny and sad. Tonally, it was a very delicate project and everyone got it. And I’ve never had that happen again to that extent.”

The "Edward Scissorhands" poster.

The Edward Scissorhands 25th Anniversary DVD is a special-edition Blu-ray giftset with commemorative package and Digital HD from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

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