Where Do You Stand? Nightmare Before Christmas, For Halloween Or Christmas

7th December 2012

By Blitzwing.

Ah, Halloween the big day of the year when all the scary DVDs (or VHS is your into the classics) come out from the bottom of the pile for another yearly spin. Another horror franchise releases the latest installment of a saga long past it’s prime, Saw – I’m looking at you, Paranormal Activity – don’t make me come over there. And BBC schedulers will be ever so creative and pick one of the Halloween films out of a hat to stick on in the middle of the night.

The other day someone told that Halloween gave them the excuse to break out The Nightmare Before Christmas. “What?” I so eloquently pondered, “but surely that’s more of a Christmas watch”. Every yule time it fits lovingly beside Muppets Christmas Carol, Home Alone and Jack Frost 2: Revenge Of The Mutant Killer Snowman as one of my favourite views. But thinking about it Nightmare does have a lot going for it as a Halloween watch. Firstly the world the main characters live in is Halloween Town, pretty big indicator there. All the colourful characters inhabiting the town are classic horror figures – vampires, mummies, witches, clowns with tear-a-way faces etc. Even the stop-motion animation lends itself more to fully realizing the grotesques and the skewed architecture of the town. It’s when we’re in Halloween Town that the film feels truly comfortable. Aside from that Halloween Jack, our hero, has become a figure for disillusioned teens and people who think it’s really cool to wear his face on a jumper to… wear his face on a jumper. Halloween Jack seems to have more in common with music like The Misfits and Marilyn Manson rather than Slade and Bing Crosby. My God I’ve been so foolish, of course it’s a Halloween watch.

Will this self revelation make me take the disc for a spin tonight? Nah I’m already planning to watch [Rec]. To me Nightmare will always be a Christmas film. You could say that the ‘Nightmare’ in the title is Halloween itself, meaning that we should enjoy the story before Christmas time comes along. But the film lovingly shows all that’s joyful about the season of good will. From the tacky to the heartfelt, Jack wants to emulate it and by emulating it, celebrates it. In his own bastardized way. The excitement of the people of Halloween reflects the excitement I feel every year. It has musical numbers in it! Now I may be quite conservative in this but Christmas time is filled with cheesy sing-a-long tunes and the occasional downbeat, heart string tugger but I can’t associate a song like ‘Mr. Oogie Boogie’ with the devil’s day.

Why bother having this internal battle anyway? Why not just watch it twice in a year? I could but the seasons are too close together. I’ve been thinking about this entirely too much and now I’m going to take an aspirin.

What does everyone else think?

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