Long Live the Pumpkin Queen: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas

Halloween Town is sleeping silently. The only sound is the distant crooning of the Sandman prowling the streets. Sally creeps to the garden behind Doctor Finkelstein’s house and gathers the herbs she needs to make a sleeping potion strong enough to affect the Sandman. She is creeping home again when the Sandman’s lullaby falls silent, and something dark and dreadful flashes by overhead. When it is gone, Sally slips into her own home and up the stairs, where she finds Jack still sleeping and the ghost dog Zero watching over him.

Downstairs, Sally brews a potion so strong it would put a woodland giant to sleep. The potion is a bright gruesome red, too obvious and visible a color. She takes the four-leaf clover given to her by the leprechaun from her pocket and drops it into the pot. It turns the potion bright green. Next, Sally sews six decoy rag dolls that look just like herself. Flitting through the town, she places them in ways that make them appear alive. She hears the Sandman find the first doll. When he discovers it is a decoy, he tears it apart in a rage.

While the sentiment is preoccupied with the decoys, Sally makes her way to the fountain in the middle of the village square and pours the clover-green brew into the water. She has barely done so when the Sandman destroys the last of the decoys and spots her. It is too soon. Sally should have made more decoys; she has no way to lure the Sandman into the poisoned fountain.

Approaching, he asks her how she has stayed hidden, and he calls her tricky, saying she is pretending to be a mere ragdoll. He blows dream sand in her face, and Sally breathes it in. It does not affect her. Sally tells him she’s pretending nothing. She is the Pumpkin Queen of Halloween Town: “I’m the one queen you won’t be able to put to sleep,” I say to him, my mouth gone flat, thinking of the human queen I met in the library (167-68).

All this time, Zero has been creeping up behind the Sandman. At this moment, he launches himself at the Sandman’s back. Sally throws herself backward just in time, and the Sandman stumbles into the fountain, sinking under the water. A moment later, he emerges, still awake. Sally is about to flee in despair when his eyes flutter shut, and he falls asleep.

Just as Sally had hoped, with the Sandman asleep, the people of Halloween Town begin to wake. They mutter among themselves about the horror of dreamless sleep, saying it’s like falling into a black void. Sally rushes to Jack’s side, and he wakes, asking her why she is crying. Sally tells him everything—how he has been asleep for days, how she accidentally left the door to Dream Town open and let the Sandman out, how she found her real parents, and how Doctor Finkelstein kidnaped her as a child.

Jack, in his mercurial way, is first outraged about Doctor Finkelstein, then eager to meet Sally’s parents and see the world she came from. Leaving the people of Halloween Town to poke and prod the soundly sleeping Sandman, Jack and Sally pass through the grove of holiday trees and into the deeper woods to the door to Dream Town. They try the door, but it has gone dead, leaving only a hollow tree. The access to Dream Town is gone.

They return to the cemetery and the mausoleum that leads back to the human world. Jack proposes that they go there and check to ensure everyone has awakened. As he reaches for the door, it grinds open, and Sally’s parents emerge. They couldn’t bear to close the last door on Sally forever, and they realized it was wrong to leave her to fight the Sandman alone, so they persuaded the Dream Townspeople to wait to destroy the last door. Passing through the human world, they found everyone awake. Sally introduces them to her husband, and they realize that if Jack is awake, then the Sandman must be asleep.

They return to Halloween Town, where the residents debate what to do with the Sandman—throw him over a cliff, squash or burn him, or lock him up. Jack introduces Sally’s parents and tells the townspeople that Sally was actually from Dream Town and Doctor Finkelstein kidnapped her. The townspeople are taken aback to learn that Sally is from another world, and Doctor Finkelstein tries to sneak away, but Jack tells him to stay right where he is.

Unfortunately, now they have waited too long to make up their minds about the Sandman, and he wakes up. However, he wakes up an entirely different person. Now he seems to be simply a gentle old man. He is astonished to wake up and remember his dreams. He has never slept or had dreams of his own before. It has made him feel quite rested and cheerful. He apologizes for getting a little carried away, putting everybody to sleep in all the worlds and stealing all their dreams. He agrees never to steal dreams again as long as Sally will continue to supply him with her potion so that he can sleep and have his own dreams. Sally agrees, and the Sandman pulls her into an enormous hug.

The next day, Jack makes Dr. Finkelstein confess that he kidnapped Sally from Dream Town. He had gone there to study dreams sand and saw Sally. He had tried many times to make himself a daughter, and he thought if he brought Sally back, he could tell everyone he had made her himself and thus establish his reputation as a great scientist. He gave her a forgetting potion, and she never remembered her home again.

A furious Jack sentences Finkelstein to 100 years of community service in Dream Town, and Sally thinks that when Doctor Finkelstein returns from that, Jack will probably banish him to the screaming swamp. In the meantime, Sally is to have free access to Doctor Finkelstein’s garden to collect whatever she wants for making potions.

Sally and Jack visit all the other holiday worlds and find everyone awake and busy preparing for their holidays. The people of Halloween Town have just enough time to finish their preparations for the holiday. Sally sews her dress and designs her crown of iron and dove feathers. When Dr. Finkelstein kidnapped her, he removed her puffed-cotton stuffing and replaced it with dead leaves. Sally restuffs herself with a mix of the two—cotton from Dream Town and leaves from Halloween Town to represent who she was and who she has become–both dream and nightmare, Sally Skellington, the Pumpkin Queen.