Following a brief detour into more grounded film about real people with Big Eyes, Tim Burton is back to telling tales of creepy children who look like Edward Gorey drawings again. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is based on the debut novel by author Ransom Riggs, who collected weird vintage photographs and wrote a story about them. It’s the tale of a teenage boy investigating the murder of his grandfather by an imaginary creature, and the quest that takes him to an orphanage caught in a strange time loop.

Eva Green, who appears to be Burton’s new female muse following Dark Shadows and Big Eyes, plays the titular Miss Peregrine. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Burton shared that she is “a shape-shifter known as an ymbryne. She protects her charges (called peculiars) from hungry monsters known as hollows. ‘She’s like a scary Mary Poppins, and she can turn into a bird.” There’s also some weird chemistry in the air, as protagonist Jacob Portman (Asa Butterfield) finds “an unlikely romance” with Emma (Ella Purnell), who, due to the vagaries of time loops, also had “a special bond” with Jacob’s grandfather. [Cue Sean Connery and Harrison Ford in Last Crusade: “I WAS the next man!”]

EW has some exclusive new photos, as does Empire, in which you can see how the grainy, black and white vintage weirdness of the photos has been translated to color. The cast also features Ella Purnell, Judi Dench, Chris O’Dowd, Allison Janney, Rupert Everett, Terence Stamp, and Samuel L. Jackson.

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IMAGES: Facebook/Fox; EW/Fox/Jay Maidment; Empire/Fox