30 years on, The Nightmare Before Christmas still slaps
I have a confession to make: Before this week I, Toussaint Egan, avowed lover of animation and all things dark and spooky, had never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas. I know, this is a shock; I’ll give you a moment to process and collect your jaws from the floor.
If you are one of the countless movie-goers who have already rightfully fallen in love with Tim Burton and director Henry Selick’s 1993 stop-motion animated classic, you might be absolutely baffled at why or how it could have taken me this long to watch The Nightmare Before Christmas. The truth is I’ve been surrounded by it my whole life, and as a consequence, I just sort of took it for granted.
It’s been 30 Halloweens and 30 Christmasses since The Nightmare Before Christmas hit theaters, and its influence is only growing. Polygon is paying tribute to Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s masterpiece of stop-motion animation with a trick-or-treat bag of stories on the goth kid touchstone. Open the rest of your Nightmare Before Christmas presents here.
But there’s good news: I was wrong, The Nightmare Before Christmas is great, and even if you think you know the story of this movie from the pervasive merchandise or cross-media tie-ins, there’s plenty that will surprise and delight you.
The characters of Jack Skellington, Sally the rag doll, and Zero the ghostly hound were nigh ubiquitous to me as a child during Halloween, and even more so when I started high school, where many of my classmates would routinely sport t-shirts, keychains, and other accessories they had presumably purchased from Hot Topic. Ironically, it was this ever-present merchandise that fueled my lackadaisical “I’ll get around to watching it eventually” attitude towards the film.
It’s not like I
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