24 movies Guaranteed to make you feel Christmassy

December 15th - The Nightmare Before Christmas

Year : 1993 Director: Henry Selick Starring: Chris Sarandon, Catherine O'Hara, Danny Elfman.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

A spooky and dark tale of a battle between Halloween and Christmas.

The story centres around Jack Skellington the pumpkin king of Halloween Town. Jack is the ring leader of Halloween and every year he makes its scarier and scarier. Eventually Jack tires of the same old routine and wanders off disillusioned with his role. Whilst out walking he stumbles across another holiday town - that of Christmastown. It is like a different world and, although Jack struggles with how this Christmas thing is meant to work, he is attracted to the spectacle of it and rushes back to his old friends in Halloween Town to tell them about it. With the backing of his friends in Halloween Town he plots to take over the Christmas holiday, kidnap Santa and run the holiday how he wants. Hmmm, how is that going to work.

No one else other than Tim Burton could come up with a film like this. Its story, cast of superb characters and the gorgeous animation combine to make it a favourite amongst youngsters. Add in plenty of humour, some very strange concepts, some peculiar song and dance routines and some sort of meditations on differences in the real world and it goes some way to explain why this is also popular with an older audience. An excellent movie all round and bound to become a bona fide Christmas classic in years to come.

Lets hope that the DVD is reissued very soon as its increasingly hard to find at the moment (presumably they are preparing for the DVD release of the superb recent 3D edition).

The Nightmare Before Christmas is placed at December 15th on our Christmas movies guide (USA edition)

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