Director Tim Burton lives most of the time in London but grew up in Burbank and attended CalArts. Even though he says the Valley gives him "the creeps," he agreed to drive around his old haunts with Los Angeles Times reporter Scott Timberg for a Halloween feature in the paper's Calendar section.

Famously, Burton wears clunky black specs with dark-blue lenses. They seem to be literally, and figuratively, the opposite of rose-colored glasses.

"The Valley," he says. "I get freaked out just coming here: It's all flat. There're even less seasons here in the San Fernando Valley, aren't there?"

Born in Burbank in 1958, when the city already seemed lost in time, Burton grew up in a middle-class neighborhood just under the airport's flight pattern. "You could watch the exhaust come down," he says.

"The thing about Burbank was, life sorta ended at the Smoke House," he says of the landmark 1946 restaurant near the Universal, Warner Bros. and Disney studios. "You didn't venture outside. You didn't get a lot of residents making that trip over the hill to Hollywood."

All artists are shaped by their upbringings, but Burton's childhood as a misunderstood loner who lived in his head ended up feeding directly into his work as a filmmaker.

As he drives past Magnolia and Victory, the main drags near his old house, he's not charmed by what he calls "that weird '50s quality" of his old neighborhood, and he's amazed by how many old liquor stores have survived. "A lot of wig shops — is there a lot of hair loss in Burbank, or what?"

But the old movie palaces — among the few oases of his childhood — are just memories now.

"There were five or six great movie theaters, including a couple of drive-ins on Burbank, all gone," he says, pointing out where each used to stand. "There was this one called the Cornell, my favorite, which showed triple features for 50 cents.... You could see 'Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde,' a Godzilla movie and 'Scream Blacula Scream.' Or three Japanese science-fiction movies."

This is where he discovered horror films from England's Hammer studios and the Italian monster movies of Mario Bava.

After passing by the church he attended as a child, we turn onto his old street, Evergreen Street, past a series of squat bungalows that becomes increasingly claustrophobic, and pull up to his boyhood house. "There's something frighteningly ordered about it, and also unknown," he says of the area. "When you look at these houses, they're so small and close together. You kinda knew your neighbors, but you didn't really know them, so there's a secretive nature to it."

For Burton, recalling "the private hell" of childhood produces various disappointed groans and sighs, as we continue on to the schools he attended. A short distance away, his high school, Burbank High — which he remembers as an imposing building alone on a hill, like the hotel in Hitchcock's "Psycho" — has changed too much for it to be very evocative. "It looks more like an airport terminal now." He's still a bit haunted by the return. "Everybody said, 'These are the best years of your life.... ' Are you kidding me?"

The years before were even worse; he describes himself as "quiet and kind of anonymous." His junior high — now Luther Burbank Middle School — looks even less inviting than he remembered it. Between chain-link fences, a sign announcing 24-hour surveillance and yellow "Caution" tape, it doesn't exactly welcome him back.

"Is this a school or is it some sort of strange prison camp?" Burton asks. "All you need is a little barbed wire on the fence and you could shoot a new 'Dirty Dozen' film here."

He walks around the campus and comes to the gym, which Burton says resembles a weapon bunker. "It's got a sinister quality to it. Like, 'This is where we hold our executions.' "

As he starts to reflect on his memories, planes take off loudly behind him. Burton's sure he couldn't go in, even if the place were open. "It's like a vampire entering a church," he says. "You can't do it."

The director seems much cheerier as our car passes the Smoke House and heads onto Barham Boulevard past Forest Lawn, one of several cemeteries where he used to play as a kid, and toward Hollywood.

"This was amazing," Burton says of the route. "Here you start to get a sense of Universal Studios, that there was a bigger world out there.... I would take the bus; I used to love making that trip to Hollywood Boulevard. It was a bit more seedy."

The tourists then headed off to Hollywood for a look around over the hill.