The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

A Christmas Story and Bad Santa are probably my favorite Christmas movies...but they don't exactly fit in with this blog, so let's go with the only holiday movie you can watch twice a year! It's weird to think The Nightmare Before Christmas came out over 20 years ago - makes me feel kind of old. While it's basically Tim Burton's brainchild, based on a storybook he wrote and illustrated, the movie was actually written by Caroline Thompson and directed by Henry Selick (who directed the...um, let's say "less good" Monkeybone and designed the weird fish for Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), as Burton was busy directing Batman Returns. Originally released under Disney's Touchstone label for being potentially too frightening for younger kids, it is, possibly, the company's biggest cult classic. Hot Topic was basically a Nightmare Before Christmas store for a while there.

So gangly Jack Skellington, the pumpkin king of Halloween Town, is depressed and craving a change of pace from planning Halloween all year, every year. While walking in the woods, Jack accidentally falls into the neighboring Christmas Town, where he's immediately captivated by the holiday cheer and strange customs...so he decides he's going to take over, and sets off a disastrous chain of miscalculations and misunderstandings. Jack is the only resident of Halloween Town who's seen Christmas Town firsthand, but he becomes the blind leading the blind, as he doesn't actually understand the place any better than the various ghouls, monsters and vampires he's enlisted to help him realize his dream.

The only Halloween Town local who's totally honest with Jack about his misguided attempts to usurp Christmas is Sally, the rag doll daughter of mad scientist Dr. Finklestein. Sally harbors a secret crush on Jack and only wants him to be happy, but she's had a vision of Jack's Christmas ending in tragedy. It's mostly because Jack and everyone around him see everything through a Halloween-tinted lens, and while they're not at all malicious, they're the wrong people for the job. They want everyone to be happy, but they just sort of assume that carnivorous holly wreaths, giant snakes and living toys are what makes everyone happy, and Jack is too caught up in his excitement and enthusiasm to realize how misguided he is.

Since there has to be a villain, Jack also makes the rather unwise decision to kidnap Santa Claus, who ends up turned over to Oogie Boogie, a New Orleans jazz-singing, gambling, glow-in-the-dark burlap sack of bugs and spiders, and the only resident of Halloween Town everyone seems to recognize as purely malevolent. While he's pretty awesome to look at, he's strangely irrelevant to the plot, only becoming involved when a rescue attempt by Sally results in both her and Santa being trapped in sort of a James Bond trap for Oogie's amusement.

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a beautifully designed movie, with a look and feel they've since tried to recapture - and not quite succeeded - with James and the Giant Peach and The Corpse Bride. I've had a soft spot for stop-motion animation ever since I saw Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts, and this is some of the most intricate you'll ever see. (We don't see much of it at all anymore, now.) The sets are gorgeous, from Oogie Boogie's Day of the Dead / Wild West-themed fluorescent casino to the wider shots of Halloween Town, which, not coincidentally, since Tim Burton is our primary source of Cabinet of Dr. Caligari homages, pretty closely resembles Holstenwall. Still, if this movie has anyone's creative stamp on it, it's Danny Elfman. He composed the score, he wrote the songs and he provides Jack's singing voice - it's as much his movie as Burton's, perhaps more so.

The message of the film is harder to unpack. Jack is a complicated character, and you could come away from the movie with a sense that it was trying to convey a number of things. That the road to Hell is paved with good intentions? That you should learn to recognize your own strengths and take pride in them, and that being the best at one thing doesn't mean you'll do well at others? If you're feeling less charitable, you could say that it's a movie that advocates learning your place, because you can't be anything except what you are. I can at least get behind two of its messages. One is that a change of scenery can be exactly what a person needs when suffering from depression and burnout. The other is that even if you try and fail, the experience can nonetheless give you a valuable new perspective and inspire you.

Available On: Netflix.

"Mephistopheles" Is Such A Mouthful In Manhattan.

Angel Heart (1987)

Angel Heart is a horror noir classic directed by Alan Parker, who would revisit the seedy South in 1989's Mississippi Burning, after which he's probably best known for his film adaptation of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Harold Angel, played by a young Mickey Rourke, is the quintessential 1950s New York City private eye - trenchcoat, stubble, glass of whiskey always within reach. He's also got an irrational fear of chickens. Contracted by the law firm of Winesap and Macintosh through their client, Louis Cyphre (a wonderfully deadpan Robert DeNiro), Angel is sent on a hunt for a wartime crooner named Johnny Favourite, who was apparently injured during the war and is likely wandering around shell-shocked with no money, no direction and possibly no memory. And if you don't know who Cyphre is supposed to be, just...I don't think there's anyone who can't figure this out, seriously.

 

I got a thing about chickens.

So Angel tracks Favourite through his known acquaintances, who tend to end up dead soon after he talks to them. First on the list is a morphine-addicted doctor who signed off on Favourite's hospital paperwork, who ends up shot through the eye while Angel is out picking up smokes and a sandwich. The trail then leads to New Orleans' French Quarter and the dark bayous of Louisiana, where Angel becomes embroiled in voodoo, devil worship and a web of lies involving Favourite, a local fortuneteller and Favourite's daughter Epiphany.

The plot here is pretty obvious - if not from the start, you should at least have figured it all out within the first half hour or so. Everyone's got a meaningful name, Cyphre barely even bothers covering up his true identity and seems to find it genuinely amusing that Angel doesn't figure it out until the end, and Parker doesn't really seem to think that you're going to be surprised when it all clicks. The real reason to watch this movie is because of its atmosphere. It's a superbly dark and foreboding piece of Deep South noir with some great New Orleans jazz music and possibly one of the best soundtracks ever, by Trevor Jones (who also did amazing work on Labyrinth and Dark City). You know where Angel is headed, you know the realization that's in store for him, but it's a compelling process just watching him get there. I don't ordinarily like Satanic movies - religious horror comes with a lot of inherent moral and cosmic baggage, and being as far from religious as you can get, I never quite buy into it or suspend my disbelief enough to actually be scared by the idea of the Devil. This is one of the few that I do like.

 

Alas, how terrible is wisdom when it brings no profit

to the wise, Johnny....

Angel Heart has a couple of other interesting bits of trivia surrounding it. Epiphany Proudfoot is played by Lisa Bonet, probably most often remembered as Denise Huxtable on The Cosby Show and A Different World. Bonet took the part in Angel Heart to move away from her contractually "pure" image, and for better or worse, it succeeded. There's a very explicit sex scene between Epiphany and Angel that had footage cut so the film could retain its R rating, and Bill Cosby had her fired from The Cosby Show as a result - which seems all the more ironic in hindsight, given what's come to light about Cosby himself in subsequent years. Angel Heart was also the primary inspiration for the 1993 adventure game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, much as Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder inspired Silent Hill.

Available On: Netflix.