After I surveyed Arcadia University students, the favorite Halloween movie seems to be “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. Having never seen it myself, I watched the movie to see why it is so popular, especially among the college-age group.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is about a skeleton named Jack Skellington who is the pumpkin king of Halloweentown. He is famous for being the best at scaring people. However, he soon becomes tired of doing the same thing year after year on Halloween, and longs for change. That’s when he stumbles on Christmas town, and learns about Christmas. He then tries to mash up Halloween and Christmas, but things don’t work out the way he plans.
The movie was made with stop-motion animation. This means each movement is captured in a photograph and then all of the photographs are played together at a fast pace to give the appearance of movement. In her article “21 Things You Didn’t Know About The Nightmare Before Christmas,” Kristy Puchko states:
Stop-motion demands a great deal of time, so when Danny Elfman had mastered most of the film’s songs, Selick got a team of 13 specially trained animators, an army of prop makers, set builders, and camera operators to work without a final screenplay. Animators began by crafting Jack’s big moment of discovery with “What’s This?” Shooting 24 frames per second meant the animators had to create unique motions for 110,000 frames total. One minute of the movie took about a week to shoot, and The Nightmare Before Christmas took 3 years to complete.
The stop-motion production gives the movie more character and uniqueness. The knowledge of the amount of time and effort this movie took to create is definitely one reason it became so popular.
Another reason is people love the songs in the movie. They are really catchy, right from the opening “This is Halloween.” People of all ages like to sing along to songs in movies. Additionally, teenagers and young adults usually like the nostalgic feeling of watching a movie they saw when they were younger. Since The Nightmare Before Christmas came out in 1993, the students I surveyed all had the opportunity to watch the movie when they were children. Furthermore, there seems to be a fascination of Disney movies among college students (and this movie was produced by Disney). I always hear people singing songs from Moana in the lounges or belting out “Let it Go” from Frozen.
Students also seem to like The Nightmare Before Christmas because it does not have the traditional “horror” of a Halloween-themed movie. I have met many students at Arcadia that don’t necessarily like horror or Halloween at all, and many still like this movie. Maybe it is because it is a mash-up of Halloween and Christmas (and most people like Christmas), or maybe it is just because it is a Disney movie that is not meant to be scary.
On a deeper, more emotional level, Arcadia students may like this movie is because of the underlying themes. The movie encourages people to be themselves and to do what they do best, rather than try to be something they aren’t. Jack had tried to take over Santa’s role, but failed and then was content with being the pumpkin king once again. Moreover, the love story between Jack and Sally is something viewers root for throughout the movie. It is introduced at the beginning when Jack is singing alone in the graveyard while Sally is watching from behind a tombstone. She knows his mission to take over Christmas and to make it scary will fail, so she tries to help him embrace his true self throughout the movie. But he didn’t listen to her warnings. This may be evidence of another moral, that sometimes people just have to fail at something before they realize what they were actually meant to do. It is about getting back up after being knocked down and trying something different.
