Directed by: Henry Selick
Starring: Catherine O'Hara, Chris Sarandon, William Hickey, Danny Elfman
In the ancient Holiday worlds, the king of Halloween, Jack Skellington has had enough. Every year, it's the same thing: Screams, scares, horrors, blah blah blah. He so desperately wants something different, and eventually wanders out and into Christmas Land.
He is tremendously enamored with this new thing. He loves the concept and feeling he gets from this place, and tries to share it with his fellow Halloween creatures. But they misunderstand, thinking of Christmas as being a new style of scaring.
Eventually, Jack decides to have Halloween Land do Christmas this year. So he gathers everyone in the Land and has them work on bringing Christmas, Halloween-style, to the world. He even has Santa Claus kidnapped, claiming that he's doing this to give Santa a break this year.
Unbeknownst to Jack, the three little rascals he has capture Santa have sinister plans in mind for the Christmas icon. They give him to Oogie-Boogie, the Boogie-Man, the most vicious, evil creature in Halloween. And Oogie-Boogie loves to play deadly games, which he always rigs in his favor...
Halloween assembles their version of Christmas, and starts to head out. Sally, a shy, but free-spirited rag-doll created by the town's mad scientist, who loves Jack dearly but has enough sense to realise how wrong Jack's plan is, tries to stop him, but Jack heads out.
So Sally decides to take things into her own stitched-together hands, and heads off to rescue Santa Claus. But things don't go as planned, and Oogie-Boogie captures her as well.
Jack delivers his sinister brand of Christmas to children all over the world, giving shrunken heads, demonic toys, killer jack-in-the-boxes, man-eating wreaths, and everything eating giant-snakes, all innocently given, unaware that he's causing even more scares. Jack is too blinded by the simple act and feeling of giving something to the people to see what's happening, a horror that everyone in Halloween Town save for Sally (who hates it) and Oogie-Boogie (who's unaware of what's going on) is enjoying greatly.
The military is brought in, and Jack is eventually shot down. He lands in a graveyard, in the arms of an angel-statue. It's there that he finally realises how badly he has screwed up. But he also realises what he IS good at, and becomes excited at the thoughts of next Halloween. Then he realises that he has to save Christmas first.
Continuity mistake: When Jack is having his Santa joyride, the army is called in to shoot him down. There is one sweeping shot of the giant cannons rising and firing at him. If you look at the bottom of the screen, you can see two small soldiers as the guns are rising, but as they fire, the soldiers blink out of existence. (00:58:30)
Trivia: At one point during the song "Jack's Lament", Jack pops up between two tombstones. The tombstone on the left is a figure from the painting "The Scream", and the tombstone on the right is the horse from Picasso's "Guernica".
Question: At the beginning of the film, when some of the monsters introduce themselves, what does the clown say after he takes his face off?
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Answer: "I am the clown with the tear-away face, here in a flash and gone without a trace."
Sierra1 ★