Directed by Henry Selik (USA, 1993, 76 min.).

Special 30th anniversary screening!

Jack Skellington, Halloween Town’s beloved Pumpkin King, has become bored with the same annual routine of frightening people. When Jack accidentally stumbles on the bright lights of Christmas Town, he gets a new lease on life—and plots to take over Christmas by kidnapping Santa Claus and taking his place.

This stop-motion masterpiece was born of Tim Burton’s childhood love of holidays: “Any time there was Christmas or Halloween… it gave you some sort of texture all of a sudden that wasn’t there before.” With these textures in mind, Burton wrote a three-page poem in 1982 called “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” He later developed it into a never-produced Christmas special, which evolved into the feature-length film.

Directed by Burton’s friend Henry Selick, the end result had such revolutionary special effects that critic Roger Ebert compared it to Star Wars, declaring it was “full of imagination and carries us to a new world.” Take a journey to that strange world—inspired in part by the art of Wassily Kandinsky, Edward Gorey, and the German Expressionists—on the 30th anniversary of this beloved film.

Watch the trailer.