When I was growing up, I was “different.” These were pre-internet days (at least for my household), so being a gloomy, gothy kid into graveyards and Halloween and creepy weird stuff certainly did not decrease any sense of alienation I already had. I felt adrift in my own personal weirdo interests.

And then there was Tim Burton.

To a creep-kid such as myself, discovering the worlds that Tim Burton created in his films was like finding something close to kinship. They were weird, creepy films for weird, creepy kids. Burton’s films felt wild, unhinged—even dangerous.

And then a weird thing happened: Tim Burton got safe. What had once seemed innovative and different became formulaic. It was almost cookie-cutter filmmaking with a generic recipe: Johnny Depp + Helena Bonham Carter + Something Generically Gothy = Blockbuster Success.

But also I got older. I’m no longer a kid: I’m a grown-ass man, with a wife, and a house, and a dog, and a cat, and credit card debt, and a taste for expensive Scotch I can’t really afford. Could it be I’ve just outgrown Tim Burton movies? That might hold up if I weren’t able to look back at his early work and still enjoy it. If, say, I popped in a copy of Edward Scissorhands and said, “Ugh, this is cloying garbage,” then maybe the theory that I’ve just gotten “too old” for his particular brand of crazy would hold water. But that’s not the case. I find Edward Scissorhands just as magical now as I did when I was a lonely little goth kid: the Danny Elfman music still tugs at my heart strings; Winona Ryder asking Johnny Depp to hold her and him replying, “I can’t,” still has the power to make me tear up, and remind me of my youth when I was so down on myself I related to monsters, and thought there was no chance in hell I’d ever end up with a girlfriend. Edward Scissorhands is pure, unbridled, wondrous magic put on film. Where did the Tim Burton who made that film go? Is it the age thing again? Did he just get “too old” for his own type of crazy?

People change, and so do tastes. There’s music I listened to back in high school that I would never listen to now, so it’s logical that the type of film Tim Burton made two decades ago wouldn’t be the film he makes today. But then I look at Martin Scorsese—a man who has been making movies for over 40 years and shows seemingly no sign of losing his touch—and I wonder: what the fuck, Tim Burton?

Burton started out working as an animator for Disney. They probably should’ve realized this when they hired him, but they found fast that his style was wildly different from what they had in mind. Burton felt hindered by Disney and wanted to work on his own, more personal project. It was with Disney money that he was able to make the live-action Frankenweenie in 1984—a film about a boy who reanimates his dead dog, a la Frankenstein. Disney fired Burton over this film—they thought it was too scary for kids. Burton was a filmmaker who took risks.

And maybe that’s part of the reason why, quite frankly, Tim Burton’s films suck now. He doesn’t need to take risks anymore. He’s already proven he knows what he’s doing; he’s set for life. Why leave your comfort zone? Believe me, I understand. It’s easier to do things the easy way. That’s why it’s called the easy way.

But—and I freely admit this is totally selfish reasoning—I want the old Tim Burton back. I want the Tim Burton who made movies that made me feel like it was okay to think the weirdo stuff I think sometimes, not the Tim Burton who lazily says, “People really love Nightmare Before Christmas, which I didn’t even direct, by the way. I see shit at Hot Topic with Jack Skellington plastered all over it. Let’s try and do that again, I guess?” and then makes mediocre movies like Corpse Bride (and a remake of his OWN movie with the stop-motion Frankenweenie).

Burton’s output up until the 2000s was pretty spot-on. His first full-length live-action film was Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, a film bustling with crazy, strange energy. Things only got weirder from there with Beetlejuice, which is the first time I, as a kid, took notice of Burton. Beetlejuice was something incredibly different for its time: a ghost story told from the ghost’s point of view. And from there, Burton hit it huge with Batman. His Batman doesn’t exactly hold up that well, but for the time it was made, it’s such an incredibly strange superhero movie—especially a big budget studio one. At the time, the general public (those not engrossed in comic books, just “average movie-goers”) had an image of Batman more akin to the goofy Adam West television series. They were not expecting the dark, gothic approach Burton took. It could’ve backfired badly, but instead it was a gigantic hit, and it more or less let Burton write his own ticket for the rest of his career.

After Batman came Edward Scissorhands, which I’ve already touched on. It’s probably Burton’s most emotional film. It’s also a film tailor-made for any loner kid who just wanted to get the girl in the end. Some of it doesn’t quite gel (for instance, even though Anthony Michael Hall’s character is a total dick, the fact that Edward ends up MURDERING HIM sort of feels like bully-revenge fantasy shit that you doodle in your notebook after you get pantsed in gym class), but there’s still magic in that movie.

For people who weren’t quite shocked by Burton’s dark Batman, he came back and put to bed any confusion over how dark he was willing to go with Batman Returns. Until the Nolan films came along, I will confess that Batman Returns was probably my favorite Batman movie. Fans of the comic (rightly) complain that Burton pretty much used existing characters to convey his own wacko ideas, but I don’t care. Batman Returns is probably one of the darkest, most nihilistic comic book movies ever made, complete with a Batman who literally just sits around, perfectly silent in the dark, until he is summoned by the bat signal; circus freaks; and a pretty-much-a-zombie Catwoman. This was the film that more or less got Burton quietly kicked off the franchise, letting Warner Brothers hand it over to the hideous claws of Joel Schumacher.

Burton followed up Batman Returns with what I consider his “best” (from a filmmaking standpoint, that is) movie: Ed Wood. While not feeling as deeply personal as Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood still feels like a movie Burton was passionate about. It’s also probably his most restrained film.

Mars Attacks! was not received very well, and it is for all intents and purposes a stupid movie, but there’s something wonderfully gleeful watching all these famous people meet cartoonishly gruesome ends.

Sleepy Hollow is overlong and bloated, but has its charms. It wasn’t really until his remake of Planet of the Apes that I began to think Burton had “lost it.” The film was a flat, lifeless mess. It felt safe; it felt like a studio movie. It did not feel like something from Tim Burton.

He rebounded from Apes with Big Fish, which is probably the last “great” Tim Burton movie. It also feels like the last film Burton made outside his comfort zone cookie-cutter formula. For instance, Johnny Depp is not the star, and while Helena Bonham Carter is in the film, she’s not the lead actress. (And for the record, I like both Depp and Carter, but seeing them over and over again in the same situations can tend to get irksome). Big Fish felt like Burton still had a little magic left in him; that he was still able to move you. But now I worry that maybe that film was the last of that magic; that it somehow robbed him of whatever he had left. Because everything after was mixed-to-terrible. His Charlie and the Chocolate Factory feels, at best, unnecessary and, at worst, annoying—with Johnny Depp giving probably the crappiest performances of his career.

Corpse Bride was clearly just Burton trying to cash-in on the popularity of Nightmare Before Christmas, and while it’s not terrible, it’s also pretty pedestrian. I enjoyed Sweeney Todd when I first saw it—I’m a fan of musicals, and seeing a musical with so much gore brought out the twisted little kid in me. But on repeated viewings, the film does not hold up. For one thing, Burton apparently has no idea how to direct musical numbers. His characters just stand around, singing awkwardly. It feels like a dress rehearsal, not the actual big show.

The less said about Burton’s output since then (Alice in Wonderland, Dark Shadows, his producing of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Frankenweenie) the better. In the span of his career, Tim Burton went from a director whose films were a must-see to a director whose films I’d rather avoid at all costs.

But is all lost? Is the metaphorical magic that I keep referring to all dried up, blown away in the wind like so much dust? There might be hope yet. Burton’s next film is Big Eyes. It’s a biopic that focuses on Walter and Margaret Keane. Walter Keane was an artist in the 1950s who created prints of weird, big-eyed kids. Or at least that’s what he claimed: the truth was his wife Margaret was the real artist. Eventually Margaret got tired of Walter taking all her credit and told the world the truth. Their marriage ended, and a court battle ensued, which—no fucking joke—ended when the judge ordered both of them to a paint-off, challenging them both to paint to prove who the real artist was.

This film shows promise, especially from Burton. For one, it’s not a remake. For another, it’s not based on a fairy tale or anything that he can “goth up.” For another, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are NOT playing the leads—Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams are. For the first time in years I find myself excited for a Tim Burton movie. Maybe there’s still some magic left. I hope so. I truly, genuinely do.