Editorials
‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ and the Pioneering Stop-Motion Animation Work of Director Henry Selick
Jack Skellington famously sings “What’s this?” when first discovering snow in the seminal stop-motion animated feature The Nightmare Before Christmas, and it’s a question that audiences likely asked upon initial release in October 1993. The strange animated feature that embraces German Expressionism and macabre character designs feels atypical of family-friendly fare yet spends the bulk of its narrative exploring the Christmas holiday as an outsider. Disney understandably felt nervous about releasing the feature, one so removed from their usual output, but misfits everywhere ensured that The Nightmare Before Christmas would eventually become not only a widely embraced classic but one of the most marketable films ever for the brand. It also happened to be the masterful feature debut of filmmaker Henry Selick.
The Nightmare Before Christmas originated from a poem penned by Tim Burton, and, thanks to the success of Burton’s short film “Vincent,” was acquired by Disney for development as a series, then as a special. But it fell into limbo for a stretch. Eventually, the project was revived as a feature film, with Burton collaborating with Disney animator Henry Selick. With Burton preoccupied with Batman Returns, Selick took the directorial reins on the painstaking stop-motion animated feature. But releasing the film under Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas meant that audiences attributed the film solely to Burton for years, overshadowing Selick’s impressive work that catapulted the film into a Disney classic.
Stop-motion animation, arguably one of the most painstaking, excruciatingly intricate art forms, involves manipulating puppets via frame-by-frame photographs to create movement when played back. Toss in facial expressions on top of character movement, and you have an obscene number of pictures required to create a single scene. That’s just to paint a brief portrait of the intense labor required to make a stop-motion animated movie. But Selick wanted to push the medium even further by forgoing the familiar flat surface employed in stop-motion to instead build full-blown set pieces for the characters so the camera could track them in a more immersive way, giving texture and dimension to this unique cinematic world.
Henry Selick and Tim Burton. Photo Credit: Disney
While Selick also made tweaks on the character design to ensure they popped on screen, like giving Jack Skellington’s suit its iconic pinstripes, the director worked closely with the performers, and occasionally composer and singer Danny Elfman, to ensure the music integrated with the imagery in ways that reinforced the movie’s themes and the stark contrast between Halloween Town and Christmas Town. The concept, character designs, and ideas are largely Burton’s, but the technique, form, and emotional center owe much to Selick’s direction.
Selick’s work in stop-motion animation didn’t end with The Nightmare Before Christmas. The director reteamed with producer Tim Burton a few years later on a stop-motion animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s James and the Giant Peach. Selick’s Monkeybone integrated stop-motion into live-action, though its peculiar tone didn’t strike with audiences upon release. That’s okay because his follow-up, Coraline for LAIKA (the studio’s first feature), earned Selick an Academy Award nomination and, thanks to a rather nightmarish Other World run by The Beldam, created stunning gateway horror for a new generation.
Last year brought Selick’s collaboration with Jordan Peele on Wendell & Wild, making this the third decade in a row that the artist/director has delivered solid gateway horror to audiences through stunning, masterful stop-motion animation. In the current digital age, where everything moves at a rapid pace, creating more reliance on VFX and computer animation, Selick’s dedication to such a meticulous art form is refreshing, and it yields breathtaking results.
The Nightmare Before Christmas turns 30 this month, and much about this holiday classic has already been explored in the three decades since its release. The music, the affecting performances by the voice cast, the peculiar world, and its quirky, horror-embracing denizens. All of it provides a comforting holiday film for those, like Lydia Deetz, at home with the strange and unusual. Strangely, though, its director remains one of the more undersung aspects of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Selick pushed the art form forward right out of the gate for his feature debut and understood Burton’s vision in a way that’s difficult to imagine anyone else could.
The most exciting question, three decades later, isn’t whether The Nightmare Before Christmas classifies as Halloween or Christmas holiday viewing. It’s what young, impressionable mind Selick’s work inspires enough to become a future stop-motion animator great to carry the medium forward in the way Selick has, himself inspired by the innovative, ground-breaking animator Ray Harryhausen as a child. Jack Skellington’s sense of wonder at discovering new textures and culture remains timeless, and The Nightmare Before Christmas still evokes a feeling of awe. There’s so much depth, visually, that you can still pick out details upon new watches even today. Much like its director, it’s a pioneer in stop-motion animation.
I first heard about The Mandela Catalogue through a couple of nephews who were obsessed with the ARG’s sinister mythology. It was only after watching Wendigoon’s in-depth analysis of the series that I realized just how deep this rabbit hole goes.
In fact, I’d already been exposed to the nightmarish visuals of Alex Kister’s YouTube creation for years at that point without even realizing that it was the origin of several viral “cursed images” and spooky memes that had leaked into the wider internet – with this viral element actually being a part of the Catalogue’s overarching narrative.
Flash-forward to 2026 and the unprecedented success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms has led to Hollywood betting on horrific internet properties with existing fanbases, which means that Kister’s unique hybrid of both religious and analog horror is finally headed to the big screen with a script written by Kister himself alongside Tyler Clifton.
While this news shouldn’t be too surprising if you’ve been keeping up with the ongoing success of The Mandela Catalogue (both myself and Wendigoon having previously predicted that the series would inevitably make the jump to theaters one day), plenty of horror fans are likely confused as to why so many folks are excited for what appears to be a Hollywood adaptation of a series of creepy .jpeg images under a VHS filter.
With that in mind, today I’d like to invite fellow readers to accompany me as I explore the origins of Alex Kister’s viral hit and attempt to explain exactly why we should all be excited about the Mandela Catalogue adaptation!
From High School Writing Project to Internet Horror Phenomenon
The first seeds of The Mandela Catalogue were sown when Kister was still in high school and developed a writing project subverting religious tropes in a world where biblical history had been altered by demonic forces. A little while later, Kister came across an analog horror contest on Reddit and decided to adapt his ideas into a standalone video where he would edit a religious kids’ cartoon –The Beginner’s Bible: The Nativity, to be specific- into something far creepier. This is how the iconic Overthrone video was born, with this viral short film taking on a life of its own as fans demanded more eerie content from Kister.
Though the video was originally meant to be a one-and-done sort of affair, with Kister actually regretting some of its primitive visuals and considering the editing amateurish and “YouTube-Poop-like” when compared to his current standards, fan reaction and free time during the COVID-19 pandemic encouraged the (then) seventeen-year-old filmmaker to continue producing content set in this same world. The Mandela Catalogue name was inspired by the Mandela Effect conspiracy theory, as the series would slowly begin to explore the subtle horror of alternate histories.
Inspired by existential dread brought on by extended periods of quarantine as well as a personal crisis of faith, Kister continued to expand his alternate timeline where the rise of Christianity had been prevented by what was presumably the Devil disguised as the Archangel Gabriel. This alternate course of fictional events led to the existence of certain paranormal anomalies that had come to be accepted as “normal” by the 1990s, which is why most of the series’ supernatural horror is presented in such a matter-of-fact manner.
Most of this background information and religious lore is delivered by increasingly cryptic broadcasts and in-universe PSAs, as well as the occasional found footage video, that often have to be decoded by clever viewers. Of course, it’s the consistently disturbing imagery that made the series so popular – much of which was originally created by Kister on a smartphone!
The Alternates: Horror’s Most Unsettling Modern Monsters
The show’s early episodes mostly take place within the fictional Mandela County in Wisconsin and depict life in a world where demonic entities are capable of using media to enter our reality. This process usually involves scaring victims into killing themselves and then repurposing their bodies as horrific doppelgangers referred to as “Alternates”. This terrifying phenomenon has become so common that local police already have specialized procedures in place to deal with the issue, though this usually consists of simply ignoring calls for help so as to avoid spreading so-called “Metaphysical Awareness Disorder” any further.
Over time, Kister would expand this mythology and incorporate different kinds of Alternates into the mix, though the story never stopped deconstructing religious concepts. The series’ second volume exponentially increased both video quality and the overall narrative scope as we began to follow the lives of characters who had already grown up in this dystopian hellscape where the government is forced to prohibit religion, television, and even mirrors in the hopes of mitigating the damage done by the ongoing invasion of otherworldly entities.
The really interesting part comes into play when you realize exactly how the Alternates make use of scary media in order to spread their demonic influence, with the analog horror of it all being a diegetic part of the story and something of a memetic trap orchestrated by the false Gabriel.
I particularly appreciate how some characters begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with their version of reality and that things weren’t meant to play out this way, especially when Mark utters the haunting line “who have I been praying to all this time?” That’s why I think The Mandela Catalogue is an effective piece of religious horror even if you don’t subscribe to the Christian worldview, as the mere idea of a world where evil has already won is a universally terrifying concept in and of itself. Not only that, but the series’ uncanny analog imagery alone is already worth the price of admission, as you’ve likely already noticed by looking at the pictures accompanying this article.
Why The Feature Adaptation Could Be Horror’s Next Big Success
It’s actually been a whole year since Kister first announced that he had been working on a feature-length screenplay for a Mandela Catalogue movie since 2022, with his proposed story following an ensemble of high-school graduates who uncover a supernatural conspiracy after the mysterious disappearance of a fellow student. This premise sounds similar to narrative elements present in the series’ second volume, but I’m pretty sure that Kister is going to go the Kane Parsons route and make the movie more of a spin-off than a re-imagining of its source material.
While notable Hollywood producers like Aaron B. Koontz, Scott Stuber, and Steven Spielberg himself are backing the upcoming project, I feel like there’s no one better to adapt this deeply personal exploration of faith and the dark side of communication than the person who first came up with it. That’s why I can’t wait to see Kister’s work on the big screen, as I have a feeling that this young filmmaker is the next one on the list about to make cinematic history – especially since this is clearly a passion project that has been in the works for years at this point!
That being said, there’s always a chance that the film could end up unleashing a fresh wave of Alternate incursions, but I guess that’s just a risk we’ll have to take.
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