You'll Never Watch The Nightmare Before Christmas The Same Way Again After Reading This Creepy Fan Theory

Christmas is just round the corner, and we’re already getting into the festive spirit by cracking out the Crimbo movies.

For those of us who like our Christmas films with a sprinkle of scaries, Tim Burton’s classic, The Nightmare Before Christmas, is always a solid choice.

But there’s a new fan theory about the children’s classic that makes the The Nightmare Before Christmas waaaaay darker than we even realised.

Buena Vista Pictures)

Taking to the Reddit thread, R/FanTheories, one particularly deep-thinking cinema buff, going by the username Richpotatothethird, laid out their theory about the residents of Halloween Town, the hometown of Jack Skellington and the setting of the film.

And it turns out, some of our favourite characters of The Nightmare Before Christmas are just…reanimated corpses?

That shiver down our spine was not due to the weather outside.

“It seems like the characters in Halloween Town are either people who died, or monsters,” the theorist explains.

“There's a graveyard too, and I was thinking that maybe the monsters, such as the werewolf, have life spans and eventually pass away.

Buena Vista Pictures)

“For the people who died, it looks like they are in different stages of decomposition. The mother and son who are corpses with their eyes sewn shut look like they've been dead for a while. Then you have full on skeletons like Jack, which would imply that Jack has been there for a long time. Then there's Lock, Shock, and Barrel who all look very recently deceased.”

Who knew that The Nightmare Before Christmas is actually just a zombie movie?

The Reddit user has also explained the presence of ghosts in Halloween Town.

“It actually seems like they are monsters that died,” they explain. “ They can turn into shadows that are shaped like the monsters they once were like in the beginning of the movie.

Buena Vista Pictures)

“One more insight into this is Zero, as he resides in a gravestone shaped like a dog house. It's pretty obvious he was alive at some point considering he has a grave as well, but perhaps he was not Jack's dog from when Jack was still alive.

“Maybe Zero is actually a pet that Jack acquired after he died and arrived in Halloween Town. Maybe Zero was some kind of monster dog that eventually passed away and came back as a ghost, like other monsters.”

And in another grim twist to their theory, the Reddit user believes that Halloween Town actually serves as ‘pergatory’ – a halfway house between heaven and hell – where some people come back as reanimated corpses and continue to just decompose as they carry out what job pertains to which world they’re living in.

Buena Vista Pictures)

“In each world, all of the creatures that live there have some sort of job they have to do that is related to the real/human world,” the Redditor explains. In Christmas land, most of the residents are elves, and their job is to make toys and help Santa, and then Santa's job is of course to deliver presents.

“The residents of Halloween town have the job of scaring people, they even say so in the first song in the movie, ‘Life's no fun without a good scare. That's our job but we're not mean...’

“So the people that die and end up there have to help as well, and have to spend the afterlife working.”

Well, that’s certainly put a dark new spin on a traditional Christmas movie. Cheers, everyone. 

Topics: Christmas, TV And Film

Kimberley Bond

Kim is a journalist at Tyla, and has previously worked at the Evening Standard, Radio Times as well as several national newspapers. A showbiz obsessive and a television fanatic, Kim is particularly interested in celebrity gossip, A-list events and the latest releases on either the big or small screen. Contact her at [email protected]

@0xKimberley