by A man embarks on a late-in-life career change and makes it everybody’s problem.
안녕하세요 and welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas. This year’s theme is Scary Santas and, since I always like to start these with a family film, our first movie is Henry Selick’s 1993 classic The Nightmare Before Christmas!
Jack Skelington, the King of Halloweentown, is disenchanted with his work. He finds his way to Christmastown and becomes obsessed with the holiday, eventually deciding that he should be in charge of it instead of Santa. However, the horrific touches he brings to Christmas only lead to disaster.
As a Christmas story, The Nightmare Before Christmas is pretty odd, and not due to all the witches, vampires, and werewolves. Instead it’s a movie about searching for the meaning of Christmas that never finds it.
In terms of themes, the movie is a mash-up of A Charlie Brown Christmas and Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. After discovering Christmastown, Jack spends all his time obsessing over the holiday, doing all sorts of research and experiments to try to figure out what it’s all about. When he can’t crack the code, he instead decides to steal the holiday. When he recognizes his failure, he doesn’t come to realize the true meaning of Christmas, he becomes re-dedicated to and newly inspired for next Halloween. Like Charlie Brown, he’s on a quest to understand the holiday and, like the Grinch, he ends up stealing it, but the revelation isn’t that the holiday is about Jesus instead of Santa Claus, or that the celebration is about coming together instead of presents, the holiday is saved by releasing Santa Claus so that he can deliver presents.
However, I don’t think the movie is about the meaning of Christmas. Instead, I think it’s about the feeling of Christmas, the sense and experience of the holiday, especially for those who aren’t keyed in to its traditional aesthetics. After Halloween, Jack is having an existential crisis. He’s lonely and doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be doing other than repeating what he’s done before. If you’re someone who doesn’t vibe with the mandatory merriment of Christmas, that’s a sentiment that’s going to resonate.
One of the achievements of The Nightmare Before Christmas is that it gives all the spooky kids a way into the holiday. There’s a movie they can watch with the family that no one has to hold their nose and suffer through. There are Christmas sweaters and ornaments that speak to that spooky vibe and the things they enjoy. Plus there’s a space for the family members who go all-in for the holiday to invite the odder members of the family to the celebration and make them feel included, not merely tolerated.
And I think we can see the legacy of The Nightmare Before Christmas in the revival of the spookier traditions around the solstice. The movie introduced the idea that Christmas could have an edge of scary fun. The kids who grew up loving this are the ones who went digging for other traditions, other ways of celebrating the holiday. I don’t think we’d have seen the on-going interest in Krampus had Nightmare not first reminded us that what lurks in the dark does not also wish for whimsy and wonder.
[recommendation]: Being a certifiable holiday classic, I don’t need to recommend it to you, you already know if you like it or not. I’ll admit, on this re-watch I was surprised at how light on plot the movie is. For example, I remembered Oogie Boogie being a much larger presence than he is and the climactic battle with him taking longer. However, it’s a masterpiece of animation and I think it does something really special.
4/5 Skeletal Santas Slinging Scary Songs
Tomorrow we’ll go back almost a full decade to look at another man who failed to get Santa right, much to everyone’s ire. Until then, stay safe and stay spooky.
