Published Oct 11, 2026, 7:30 PM EDT
Hannah covers horror, sci-fi, and games at Collider, where she writes news and features, reviews new releases, and interviews the people who make them. She’s helping build out Collider’s gaming coverage, with Pokémon as one of her specialties. If she isn’t writing about a monster, she’s probably watching one on a tape from her VHS collection.
Tim Burton has spent much of his career making the supposedly frightening characters easier to love than the “respectable” people around them. Edward Scissorhands found cruelty behind suburban smiles, while Beetlejuice made the afterlife look considerably more entertaining than dealing with the living. His movies give outsiders somewhere to belong, even when that somewhere comes with a few graves.
That makes his work particularly inviting in October, when skeletons and haunted houses become part of the decorating scheme. The attraction extends beyond how those movies look, though. Burton’s best misfits want things audiences can understand, whether that means companionship or simply being allowed to exist without someone treating them as a problem. The supernatural complications give those desires a story worth returning to.
Corpse Bride is doing exactly that on HBO Max, 21 years after its 2005 release. According FlixPatrol, the gothic animated romance sits at No. 4, directly above Coraline. The same top ten includes The Shining and A Nightmare on Elm Street, putting Burton’s movie among several obvious October viewing choices. Its position also makes it the highest-ranking animated movie on the chart at the time of writing this article, giving its unusual love story an impressive showing ahead of Halloween.
Four of the largest communities on the planet, and four completely different reasons to belong to one. Here is yours, what it would give you, and the argument you would be having within a week.
You belong to the fandom that is really about comfort. Hogwarts works on people because it is a place rather than a plot, and the pull is not the wizard war so much as the corridors, the food, the weather and the sense that somebody is expecting
You belong to the deepest fandom on this list, the one where somebody has always read further than you and is quietly delighted to say so. Middle-earth rewards patience more than any other world in popular culture.
You belong to the loudest and largest tent of the four, the one where three generations are all watching the same thing and none of them agree about any of it. That disagreement is not a flaw in this fandom, it is the main activity.
You belong to the thinking fandom, the one that turns up for the argument rather than the explosion. Trek has always been a series of ethical problems in space, and the people who love it love being asked what they would have done.
Directed by** Burton and Mike Johnson**, Corpse Bride follows Victor (Johnny Depp), who accidentally marries a dead woman while rehearsing his vows for another wedding. Helena Bonham Carter voices Emily, the bride who takes him into the land of the dead, while Emily Watson plays his living fiancée, Victoria. The predicament gives the movie its gothic romance, with Victor’s attempt to get home complicated by Emily’s hope that she has finally found someone to love.
Its No. 4 position puts it ahead of several of HBO Max’s best-known Halloween titles. On the October 5 chart, Coraline follows at No. 5, with The Shining at No. 6 and A Nightmare on Elm Street at No. 7. Friday the 13th and Scooby-Doo also make the top ten, giving Corpse Bride a strong showing in a chart crowded with seasonal favorites, even without a new sequel driving attention toward it. The ranking also offers a different angle from the success of newer releases. 21 years after arriving in theaters, Burton and Johnson’s stop-motion movie is sharing the top five with Evil Dead Burn, Backrooms, and Supergirl. Its placement shows an older animated movie holding its own alongside recent titles as Halloween approaches.
For HBO Max subscribers putting together an October watchlist, Corpse Bride remains one of the service’s most popular movie choices.
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Mike Johnson, Tim Burton
Victor Van Dort (voice)
Victoria Everglot (voice)
Nell Van Dort / Hildegarde (voice)