We've already looked at the references to the comics in Batman Returns, but now we look to everything else – films, music, architecture, literature, history, real life people and events, etc.

The opening shot of the movie pays homage to the opening scene from Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). In both movies, we open on an exterior shot of a foreboding mansion at night. In the foreground we see a gate adorned with the family initial.


We then angle in on a solitary illuminated window in the otherwise darkened mansion. But where Welles' movie opens with a death, Burton's begins with a birth.


Throughout the following scenes we never see the monstrous child, echoing Roman Polanski's approach to the demonic infant in Rosemary's Baby (1968). In both movies we just see the child's cradle/pram and are left to infer their appearance based on the horrified reaction of their parents.

The scene of Oswald's abandonment is the first of several Biblical allusions to the Book of Exodus. Just as Moses' parents sent him down the Nile in a basket, so Oswald's parents place his baby carriage into the river in Gotham Park. But where Moses' parents were trying to save their son's life, Oswald's are trying to kill him.

The design and lighting during the title sequence evoke the famous Viennese sewers from Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949).