In anticipation of the Burton retrospective, which comes to the New York Museum of Modern Art this November, Harper's Bazaar asked Burton to dream up his fantasy fashion spread, one inspired by his own movies. Of course, these outfits will set you back a few thousand dollars apiece, to say nothing about the giant skeleton props.

Tim Burton's Magical Fashion [Harper's Bazaar via Super Punch]

Bernard Herrmann

Herrmann is one of the most celebrated composers in Hollywood history, having scored classics from Citizen Kane to Psycho to Taxi Driver. He makes our list for his groundbreaking score for 1951's The Day The Earth Stood Still (pictured above), with its prominent use of the theremin. After this movie, use of the eerie, otherworldly, electromagnetic instrument became the signature sound of sci-fi scores.

Louis and Bebe Barron

The Barrons took Herrmann's innovation a quantum leap further with their score for 1956's Forbidden Planet, which featured not a single traditional acoustic instrument. The husband-and-wife team's collection of all-analog burbles and bleeps sounds delightfully retro today, but the movie's all-electronic score was, at the time, controversial. Still, the sounds ideally complemented the tale of an isolated planet beset by an invisible monster.

Jerry Goldsmith

Goldsmith's 1968 score for Planet of the Apes swung the pendulum back toward traditional orchestration for sci-fi movies. Well, sort of; his tense, percussive score (echoing Charlton Heston's attempt to hold onto his sanity) included a Brazilian instrument called a culka that sounds like hooting monkeys. Goldsmith would go on to write many other memorable sci-fi scores, notably, Alien (1979) and the majestic theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which would be reworked for TV as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

John Williams

With the original Star Wars (1977), John Williams became the gold standard of sci-fi composers. His Wagnerian use of leitmotifs created instantly memorable themes for the major characters, and his grand opening fanfare is so thoroughly evocative of the movie that it instantly transports viewers back to the sense of awe and wonder they felt when they first saw that imperial cruiser fill the screen. Williams has scored just about every film Steven Spielberg has made; his five-note theme for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) became a character in itself.

Vangelis

The Greek new age composer is best remembered for his electronic score for Chariots of Fire, but his work on Blade Runner (1982) was similarly stellar, a mix of electronica, noirish brass, and traditional orchestral sounds that matched the movie's polyglot futurism.

James Horner

Yes, now he's known for syrupy goo like Titanic, but he got his start as a scrappy Roger Corman factory worker (Battle Beyond the Stars, 1980). He soon graduated to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), where he expanded on Jerry Goldsmith's score for the first movie to include nautical themes (fit for all those Moby-Dick references in the script). His elegaic music surrounding Spock's death and funeral was an early sign of Horner's ability to create music tearjerking enough to make a Vulcan cry. (Genre fans will also recall Horner's memorable scores for 1983's Krull and Brainstorm.)

Alan Silvestri

Silvestri, who's scored nearly every Robert Zemeckis film, is a disciple of John Williams who has a knack for creating a grandiose sound that makes his patron's movies seem bigger and zippier than they are. Case in point: his first big job, the Back to the Future trilogy (1985/89/90). Heard now, it instantly evokes Marty McFly zipping along on his skateboard, or Doc Brown firing up the time-traveling DeLorean. Silvestri's other genre works include Predator, The Abyss, and both Lara Croft movies.

Danny Elfman

Elfman, whose work is so closely associated with Tim Burton that he seems to be the musical portion of the director's brain, combines a reverence for traditional movie orchestration with an irreverence toward classical melody, bred perhaps of his days as the frontman for Oingo Boingo. The result is a frenetic, jumpy, off-kilter sound that's nonetheless grand and majestic, a sound that makes Elfman's music instantly recognizable, not to mention well-suited to such Burton genre pastiches as Ed Wood (1994) and Mars Attacks (1996).

Basil Poledouris

Poledouris created stately, mournful scores for movies with rugged, damaged heroes (the Conan the Barbarian films) and lent a gravity to Paul Verhoeven's science fiction films (notably, 1987's RoboCop and 1997's Starship Troopers) that helped ground their deadpan satire in real human emotions.

Bear McCreary

The ubiquitous 30-year-old composer (who'll be performing the score from Battlestar Galactica this Saturday at a free concert at Los Angeles' California Plaza, as well as next month at Comic-Con) is the sci-fi scorer of the moment, thanks to his television work on BSG and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. His tension-filled scores, mixing traditional orchestration with less orthodox instruments (accordion, bagpipe, duduk, erhu), is completely integral to his shows; particularly BSG, where his Middle Eastern/metal rearrangement of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (familar and strange at once) was key to understanding the plot and characters.

Openly Aggressive Alien Invaders
You know the type; they come with their guns and their bombs, to quote Dolores O'Riordan, and just try to blow shit up until we surrender. We've seen their kind in War Of The Worlds (whichever version you want), any Dalek-themed episode of Doctor Who, Independence Day or even Transformers, and they're the kind of alien invaders that the world expects - Straight, to the point, and despite their superior firepower, ultimately prepared to fall to our superior intellect, pluck and whatever contagious diseases may be going around at the time.

Passively Aggressive Alien Invaders
These aliens are much sneakier and more difficult to deal with. Oh, they come with promises of all manner of intergalactic treats and peaceful transactions, but behind their oddly perfect grins, they're really lizard people who eat mice whole. I speak, of course, of the aliens from V, but we've seen similar tactics from Secret Invasion's Skrulls ("Embrace change," indeed. The only change they want for us is the one from breathing to six feet under) and, memorably, Mars Attacks's big-brained psuedo-pacifists:

Secret Invaders
Where the Skrulls went wrong, of course, was coming out of the alien closet. If they'd just stuck to their original plan of being undetectably undercover, then world domination could've been theirs much more easily - if less profitably for Marvel Comics. Think of how successful the 1970s Invasion of The Body Snatchers was (and try to ignore Nicole Kidman's shameful The Invasion, while you're at it), or the fact that poor David Vincent never quite managed to completely save the day in The Invaders. Particularly popular in times of American foreign affair paranoia, secret invaders can also generally be identified by the nearby presence of a title that includes some variation on the word "invasion."

Accidental Invaders
It's not just The Day The Earth Stood Still's Klaatu who found himself mistaken for a hostile force; poor ET almost got himself dissected by an overzealous government with cell-phone handguns, as well, and don't get me started on those poor musical bastards from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Call it the human disease: seeing something different and just expecting the worst without provocation. I mean, sometimes, even those who do intend to cause destruction aren't really entirely bad guys: think about the Vogons in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, who destroy the Earth only because it's in the way, or Star Trek: The Next Generation's Borg, who only want us all to be brothers and sisters and share the same interests, likes and dislikes, and hive mind. Is it that wrong to condemn them?

Well, yes. After all, if we don't condemn them before they destroy our planet, how are we supposed to do it afterwards? If there's another thing that science fiction has taught us, after all, it's that whichever aliens are going to make contact with the human race, there's a very high percentage that their language's version of the words "widespread destruction and/or subjugation of the native population" are going to appear somewhere on their list of things to do. It may seem cruel and overly suspicious, but in this dog-obliterates-dog-with-raygun universe, the case can always be made that it's worth cutting open a couple of friendly aliens who just want to phone home if it means that we don't end up under the extra-terrestrial boot heel of some inhuman Space Hitler. Take my word for it, people: hope for the best all you want, but if you happen to make first contact with an alien, make sure that you do so with at least a knife handly, just in case. And whatever you do, remember: Don't cover your mouth when you sneeze.