my favorite nightmare

anyone who's known me for any period of time can guess what this post is going to be about based solely on the title. i thought it a fitting topic, considering today is halloween!

the rest of you can stay in the dark for a tiny bit longer, yes? yes. here's a little scene setting for you:

it's 1993. i'm 10ish. i see previews for a movie that i want to see so badly, i can hardly see straight.

but movies were never really an option for me as a kid, so i never got to see it.

i am either 10 or 11, and it's early 1994. i'm with my dad at a store, and he's buying a big screen television. i'm wandering the store while he haggles with the guy over price, and lo and behold, the movie is playing on one of their TVs, with audio and everything.

i plop down on a couch (convenient, those living room mock ups are!) and watch half an hour of it, completely enraptured. i am a very unhappy camper when dad makes me leave the store before the movie is over.

the movie i'm talking about, of course, is The Nightmare Before Christmas.

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still, to this day, i love everything about it. i love the soundtrack, i love the creepy aesthetic, and i love the stop-motion claymation business. (the aesthetic - goth-lite, perhaps? - has always been something i love, though i've never made myself up as such). i love the covers the soundtrack has garnered (especially the Vitamin String Quartet one), and i love the implications of the story for real life.

for me, The Nightmare Before Christmas represents the very best of my childhood; it makes me nostalgic, it makes me happy, and it has always, always spoken to some part of my psyche that it continues to assuage today. in fact, i love almost everything tim burton has ever produced (save for one thing in particular) - edward scissorhands, corpse bride, 9, james and the giant peach ... but Nightmare is my favorite.

and, as proof that the apple often doesn't fall far from the tree? my daughter adores it, too.

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HAPPY HALLOWEEN, EVERYBODY! <3