The Nightmare Before Christmas
dir. Henry Selick
Touchstone Pictures
The Nightmare Before Christmas gives death a big snuzzly bear hug, and doesn't let go. From the protagonist (a skeleton-headed scarecrow) to his love interest (a sewn-up Frankenstein's monster who, stitchmarks aside, is one of the loveliest belles ever to grace the world of stop-motion animation), the film is a naked skull with a shit-eating grin pasted across its laughing white face.
Despite its quirky, morbidly goofy spirit, The Nightmare Before Christmas has a fairly straightforward plot. Jack Skellington works full-time preparing for and staging Halloween. And although he's the star of Halloweentown and the acknowledged pumpkin king of the holiday, he hungers for something more.
Enter: Christmas. Skellington's expansive, inquisitive, and idealistic spirit leads him to believe that the mostly-dead but surprisingly perky residents of Halloweentown could do a better job at staging Christmas than Santa and his elves. Naturally, chaos ensues.
The recently re-released 1993 film is one worth seeing. When creator Tim Burton builds a world, he doesn't go halfway. His vision for Batman redefined the entire cultural concept of what a live-action superhero movie could be. Likewise, his work on Nightmare Before Christmas must be seen, preferably in the theater, to be believed. Director Henry Selick works skillfully within Burton's universe: Every frame of the film jumps with campy humor, macabre detail-work and an intoxicating blend of Edward Gorey artistic morbidity and Scooby Doo wackiness.
Its Danny Elfman score of dark pizzicato and woodwinds sets the scene and robustly supports the many musical numbers that make Nightmare a dazzlingly dark sing-along of cartoonish proportions.
Like any good musical, Nightmare uses its songs to spike critical moments of plot development and encapsulate important revelations and decisions with snappy lyrics and sing-along music. One of the film's happiest moments is when Jack Skellington stumbles upon Santa's Village in Christmastown, and expresses his wonder and surprise in a song that goes, in part, like this:
There's children throwing snowballs
instead of throwing heads
they're busy building toys
absolutely no one's dead
And while the entire production is pretty enjoyable, there's something about Nightmare that elevated it above most cute little holiday films, and brought it a cult following which fawn over its collectibles and the fan sites it has spawned.
Nightmare's place in mainstream society may be a gentle blip on the radar: It's a high-quality stop-animation film with a cachet as one of the few Halloween specials worth repeating, along with Charles Schulz's epic saga of the Great Pumpkin. But to a small and dedicated following in the goth community, Nightmare is special. It's a film that goes to the root of what it means for many to be "goth," in a way that no musical group really approximates.
The heart of a well-adjusted goth beats with the blood that The Nightmare Before Christmas is soaked in. Halloweentown isn't a collection of wounded, miserable, depressing monsters ekeing out an angry, lonely existence; it's a collection of freaks and geeks living as part of a basically happy, cohesive community. When Jack Skellington discovers the wonders of Christmastown, he gives a public lecture, and everyone turns out. When Jack goes missing, the mayor calls a town meeting, and the town square is packed with concerned monsters.
Beneath horrifying facades beat warm hearts. There isn't any prejudice or hatred in Halloweentown, and no one's particularly concerned that everyone wears black and seems to have a death fetish or be dead themselves.
There's an irony to the film's main message, which is "don't try to pretend to be that which you are not." It's exactly what mainstream society has always told members of fringe cultures, as long as fringe cultures have been around. But the answer is loud and clear: "We aren't pretending this is who we are." It's those in the mainstream who have generally failed to acknowledge their true selves, and announce them to the world.
It's going too far to say that The Nightmare Before Christmas is a cinematic classic that demands a viewing. But it's a film with a heart of gold, and a keen ear for balancing sentiment and style and no one, anywhere, dressed in any color, should ever feel bad about loving it.
James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)