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Is Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween or a Christmas Movie?


Nightmare Before Christmas
Credit: Disney

The Nightmare Before Christmas is always high on autumn or early winter watchlists, but when is the best time to watch it? Halloween, or Christmas?

From the start of the spooky season to the first Christmas fairy lights, autumn and early winter are the coziest times. This goes not only to the warm decorations, or the smells of pumpkin spice and ginger. Naturally, the spirit of the season finds its way into our movie lists for those times. The Nightmare Before Christmas is a movie you might find in both your Christmas and your Halloween suggestions. So, is Tim Burton’s stop motion animation a Halloween or a Christmas movie? Here’s what we think.

Is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween Movie? Arguments For

Is Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween or a Christmas Movie
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Credit: Disney

One of the greatest arguments for categorizing The Nightmare Before Christmas as a Halloween movie is its opening:

“This is Halloween, this is Halloween
Pumpkins scream in the dead of night
This is Halloween, everybody make a scene
Trick or treat 'til the neighbors gonna die of fright
It's our town, everybody scream
In this town of Halloween.”

The deliciously fun and spooky song by composer Danny Elfman perfectly captures everything we’ve come to associate with Halloween the past few decades. The inhabitants, whose only job is to scare and celebrate an eternal Halloween invite us to their spooky land, which isn’t as menacing as you might think!

Despite the fun, whimsical elements, however, the characters we’ve come to love are entirely products of Halloween. From cute skeleton Jack to Sally, a doll that sews herself back, from the Corpse Kid and the smiling Mayor, the characters are meant to dwell in their Halloween town. Remove them, and… well, the movie is more or less about happens if you remove them from the setting that’s almost indistinguishable from them.

Is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Christmas Movie? Arguments For

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Credit: Disney

Those who consider The Nightmare Before Christmas to be a Christmas movie have a few solid arguments and they are the same used to argue against its being a Halloween movie; the title for one. Show me a Christmas movie that isn’t about something happening before and up until Christmas. But it goes more deeply than that.

If you know nothing about the stop-motion animation’s creepy aesthetics, and nothing about Tim Burton’s signature style – in short, if you just hear about the film, it’s much easier to assume The Nightmare Before Christmas is what the title says: a Christmas movie. It is, after all, about the residents of a town preparing to celebrate Christmas. Santa Claus is a character, and Jack’s attempt to abduct him is a core part of the plot.

As can be expected, something goes horribly wrong, and Christmas as we know it is put at stake. The plot then becomes a heist of sorts to save Christmas, concluding in a happy turn of events, with the characters learning what Christmas is really about. 

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Is The Nightmare Before Christmas a Halloween Movie? The Verdict

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Credit: Disney

Both schools have strong arguments as to why The Nightmare Before Christmas is a Halloween or a Christmas movie. The aesthetics are decidedly Halloween, especially at first. Then again, if there’s a formula, a “Hero’s Journey” so to speak, like Joseph Campbell’s “monomyth” that could apply specifically to stock plots about Christmas movies, Burton’s 1993 movie follows it. Its broad strokes, that is.

There’s no such thing as a perfect formula, and, in art, there shouldn’t be. While there’s a number of conventions we expect to find in many Christmas and Halloween films, no movie can tick all the boxes. And some, will tick boxes you never expected to find in their seasonal sub-genre; that’s the beauty of it!

What is a Christmas or a Halloween movie anyway? At the end of the day, it’s all about how the movie makes us feel, how it gets us feeling cosy and ready to celebrate our favorite holidays. In that sense, there’s no need to fight about the status of The Nightmare Before Christmas (although, as a nerd and an English major, I do love a good argument about literature and various other media). It is what you make it. You can watch it whenever you feel like it, be it Halloween, Christmas, New Years, or the middle of the summer.

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For more articles like this, take a look at our Movies page.