It tells the story of an unfinished artificial humanoid who has scissor blades instead of hands, is taken in by a suburban family, and falls in love with their teenage daughter.

During pre-production of Beetlejuice, Thompson was hired to adapt Burton's story into a screenplay, and the film began development at 20th Century Fox after Warner Bros. declined.

One snowy evening, an elderly woman tells her granddaughter the bedtime story of a young man named Edward, who has scissor blades for hands.

Many years earlier, Peg Boggs, a local door-to-door Avon saleswoman, not having any luck in her own neighborhood, tries to sell at the decrepit Gothic mansion where Edward lives.

Jealous of Kim's attraction to Edward, Jim takes advantage of his naivety by asking him to pick the lock on his parents' home so he can steal his father's electronic goods and sell them to buy a van.

As the neighbors gather, Kim convinces them that Jim and Edward killed each other, holding up an extra hand of blades she grabbed from a display case in the mansion as proof.

The genesis of Edward Scissorhands came from a drawing by then-teenaged director Tim Burton, which reflected his feelings of isolation and being unable to communicate to people around him in suburban Burbank.

During pre-production of Beetlejuice, Burton hired Caroline Thompson, then a young novelist, to write the Edward Scissorhands screenplay as a spec script.

[7] She wrote Scissorhands as a "love poem" to Burton, stating "He is the most articulate person I know but I couldn't tell you a single complete sentence he has ever said".

[8] Shortly after Thompson's hiring, Burton began to develop Edward Scissorhands at Warner Bros., with whom he worked on Pee-wee's Big Adventure, Beetlejuice, and Batman.

[10] When writing the storyline, Burton and Thompson were influenced by Universal Horror films, such as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Frankenstein (1931), and Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), as well as King Kong (1933) and various fairy tales.

He had the opportunity to do any film he wanted, but rather than fast track Warner Bros.' choices for Batman Returns[6] or Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian, Burton opted to make Edward Scissorhands for Fox.

Burbank, California was considered as a possible location for the suburban neighborhoods, but Burton believed the city had become too altered since his childhood[13] so the Tampa Bay Area of Florida, including the town of Lutz, on Tinsmith Circle inside the Carpenter's Run subdivision, and the Southgate Shopping Center of Lakeland was chosen for a three-month shooting schedule.

[23] To create Edward's scissor hands, Burton employed Stan Winston, who would later design the Penguin's prosthetic makeup in Batman Returns.

[28] The giant topiaries that Edward creates in the film were made by wrapping metal skeletons in chicken wire, then weaving in thousands of small plastic plant sprigs.

Edward is found living alone in the attic of a Gothic castle, a setting that is also used for main characters in Burton's Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Edward Scissorhands is a fairy tale book-ended by a prologue and an epilogue featuring Kim Boggs as an old woman telling her granddaughter the story,[27] augmenting the German Expressionism and Gothic fiction archetypes.

The website's consensus reads: "The first collaboration between Johnny Depp and Tim Burton, Edward Scissorhands is a magical modern fairy tale with gothic overtones and a sweet center"[34] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 74 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[36] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone praised the piece by stating, "Burton's richly entertaining update of the Frankenstein story is the year's most comic, romantic and haunting film fantasy."

[37] Amy Dawes of Variety spoke highly of the film, "Director [Burton] takes a character as wildly unlikely as a boy whose arms end in pruning shears, and makes him the center of a delightful and delicate comic fable.

"[38] Marc Lee of The Daily Telegraph scored the film five out of five stars, writing, "Burton's modern fairytale has an almost palpably personal feel: it is told gently, subtly and with infinite sympathy for an outsider who charms the locals but then inadvertently arouses their baser instincts."

"[40] Rita Kempley, also writing for The Washington Post, praised the film: "Enchantment on the cutting edge, a dark yet heartfelt portrait of the artist as a young mannequin."

She too praised Depp's performance in stating, "... nicely cast, brings the eloquence of the silent era to this part of few words, saying it all through bright black eyes and the tremulous care with which he holds his horror-movie hands.

"[43] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film a mixed review, awarding it two stars out of four and writing that "Burton has not yet found the storytelling and character-building strength to go along with his pictorial flair.

"[44] Stan Winston and Ve Neill were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Makeup, but lost to John Caglione Jr. and Doug Drexler for their work on Dick Tracy.

[52] Metal band Motionless in White have a song entitled "Scissorhands (The Last Snow)", with its lyrics written about the film in homage to its legacy and impact on the gothic subculture.

[53] Additionally, metal band Ice Nine Kills wrote and performed the song "The World in My Hands" on their fifth studio album, The Silver Scream.

[54] In 2012, Depp reprised his role in the Family Guy episode "Lois Comes Out of Her Shell"; in the cutaway, Edward takes up a babysitter job and promises to the parents to make sure the baby is handled with as much care and fragility as possible; within seconds of going into the nursery, he suddenly remerges, declaring "it's dead".

[56] From 2014 to 2015, IDW Publishing released an Edward Scissorhands comic book series which serves as a sequel and takes place several decades after the film.

[60] The British director Richard Crawford directed a stage adaptation of the Tim Burton film, which had its world premiere on June 25, 2010, at The Brooklyn Studio Lab and ended July 3.