Nightmare is a riff on the cheery old stop-motion TV holiday specials like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer - but it subverts them only to affirm them. But their celebration of the spooky thrills of (respectively) Halloween and old monster movies, their love of grotesquerie and gleeful subversiveness that is not really so subversive at all, tells the same tale as our love of stories that actually scare us. Not that The Nightmare Before Christmas or Frankenweenie are particularly frightful, except perhaps to the very young. It speaks to us of mortality, of the moral and existential implications of the kind of beings that we are: creatures of frail flesh and eternal spirit, alienated from our world and from ourselves, haunted by dreams we can’t attain and dread we can’t escape. Goblins, witches and monsters haunt the fairy tales of childhood, and older audiences brave vampires, zombies and stories of possession and exorcism. The denizens of Halloweentown in The Nightmare Before Christmas are not wrong when they sing in their opening song, “Life’s no fun without a good scare.”Įven babies like a mild startle or scare their widening eyes as they laugh hysterically at a game of peek-a-boo attest the rush of adrenaline. On some level, whatever frightens or repels us also draws us - and this is not simply perversity. Why do we enjoy creepiness? Why do we watch scary movies or enjoy dressing up as ghosts or monsters on Halloween? Why did medieval Christians adorn their cathedrals with gargoyles and grotesques - and why did they illustrate and dramatize danses macabres, with Death leading a grim procession of human beings to the grave? There’s something dreamlike about the slightly herky-jerky effect of dolls moving and walking, an effect as old as the earliest silent films, and like silent film seeming to belong to another world. Dolls and toys evoke the precritical world of childhood, reaching past our rational defenses. Any genre filmmaker knows the potential of innocent childhood things for creepiness. What is it about stop-motion? The illusion of life never entirely suppresses the awareness that we are watching objects moving by themselves: puppets, dolls, toys.
(The Halloween release The Book of Life, which is computer-animated but has a distinctly stop-motion look, may be another example.) Conversely, Columbia’s Monster Housedemonstrates that computer-animated movies can be creepy, though the smoothness and perfection of computer animation are best suited to other moods and subjects. Stop-motion doesn’t have to be creepy take Aardman’s charming “Shaun the Sheep,” or the brilliant BBC Jesus film The Miracle Maker. Stop-motion animation - which, unlike computer animation and traditional hand-drawn cel animation, utilizes real objects shot frame by frame, with tiny adjustments made between shots - is a defiantly old-fashioned, niche medium, often used to creepy effect: Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie Aardman’s Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
The Boxtrolls is the latest macabre stop-motion animated tale from Laika, the studio behind Coraline and ParaNorman. Stop-Motion Macabre Why do we love creepy movies about animated puppets? SDG Original source: Catholic Digest