Review of The Nightmare Before Christmas

Jack Skelington is a celebrity/deity figure in the town of Halloween. He is a philosophical, social, and embodiment of the spirit of Halloween. Jack gets bored of celebrating Halloween year after year. He ventures into the woods and finds various holiday doors. Jack goes into the Christmas door and finds snow for the first time. He performs an entire musical highlighting his intrigue and curiosity. Jack becomes mesmerized by how different Christmas is from Halloween. He even gathers elements of Christmas like a candy cane and a tree ornament to perform experiments to gain an understanding of Christmas. Jack eventually comes to some conclusions and an understanding of the holiday philosophically. Jack presents these findings to the town of various monsters but they have a hard time understanding the concept of Christmas. Jack states that the town will celebrate Christmas. All of the town members take a role to make the town ready to celebrate Christmas. Jack decides to take the role of Santa and the townspeople make decorations for the town, gifts, and even reanimating deer to make reindeer. Jack even demands that the real Santa be kidnapped so that Jack could replace him. Jack celebrates Christmas by impersonating Santa but unfortunately the Halloween Towns people have created horrifying toys for the children meanwhile jack unknowingly gives them to all the kids. At the end the military hunts down Jack and shoot down from the sky. Jack awakens from the crash angry and sad that he did a poor job celebrating Christmas and sternly sings that he will be himself in Halloween Town to celebrate Halloween. Jack at his core is a monster that celebrates Halloween. He is a literal skeleton, a well known symbol of Halloween. The Town of Halloween is full of monsters and demons all of which embody horror, fear, and Halloween. Jack simply tried to add variety in his life but went against his philosophical nature becoming a walking contradiction. This is highlighted mostly at the end of the movie when Jack is shot down. During Christmas most people would never think to shoot down Santa’s sleigh but in this movie they did. That moment highlights how far he deviated from being Santa. The townspeople of Halloween were not willing to change enough for Christmas. One of the monsters (they were unnamed) even created a hat made from a flattened dead rat. All the toys were horror based. One of the children famously got a head. The town had no concept of Christmas like Jack did. Jack at least understood the tradition of Christmas as Santa. However He did not teach them how to be elves. Jack wanted to add some variety to his life. There is nothing wrong with that however in Jack’s case he tried to change his beliefs to a drastically opposing view to his own beliefs. When we are confused it can shock your core. For example if a bunch of people told you the sky was purple some people may start to get really confused and misunderstand current information they have. Kind of like the show “Spongebob” in the episode “pickles”. Overall the townspeople and Jack basically lived in Plato's cave in this movie. They had an incomplete understanding of Christmas. As a result they merged 2 contradicting holidays together i.e Halloween and Christmas. Because as people we try to pool existing truths to unknowns to make more truths(fun fact this is how algebra works).