What is the aim and goal of a sequel, and how does its medium impact that aim?
The Nightmare Before Christmas is about as iconic a film as you can get; calling Jack Skellington the Super Mario of scenegoth (very affectionately) is definitely one of those how dare I/you know I’m right kind of things, so in hindsight it’s a bit unusual that it’s never had a sequel – at least in cinema.
There’s a proper case to be made that Corpse Bride is Nightmare’s legitimate heir as a spiritual successor, but in terms of a direct continuation of the story and world, Nightmare remains a moment in time.
But today we’re looking at two continuations of the story that exist in different mediums and whose canonicity appears to be some sort of gray area, given they are official and have that indelible mark of authenticity, but definitely haven’t penetrated the zeitgeist like the movie did. I’d wager most people who saw the first might only be passively aware these exist, if they do at all.
So let’s fall back through the jack o’lantern door together as we catch up with what the Halloween Town gang has been up to since the curtains fell on that year-round pumpkin spice latte of stop-motion cinema, The Nightmare Before Christmas. (I won’t stop calling things that. You know I’m right.) And maybe along the way, we’ll stumble upon an answer to the question, how does a sequel’s medium impact what it’s meant to be?
Oogie’s Revenge dropped in the later part of that gaming era where licensed games based on big properties were still a bit touch and go. Pre-Arkham, pre-Insomniac or Beenox Spidey, you just kind of had to hope you were getting a good one rather than something slapped together to be sold less on the gameplay and more on brand recognition.
But this game bleeds legitimacy; every locale in and around Halloween Town is lovingly re-created, the super-stylized aesthetic helping the graphics hold up to this day. The original cast reprise their roles, bringing back the same zest as in the cinema. Being released twelve years after the movie, the team had no maddening time-crunch to tie in with a theatrical release, and they were able to pour their love into it.
One really neat thing about Oogie’s Revenge is how the boss battles have new songs – some entirely original, some being repurposed melodies from the film with new lyrics – as sung by the characters during the fights.
I love this touch so much even if the rollout is perhaps imperfect (if the boss battle takes too long, the song just…loops ad infinitum). It shows how much Buena Vista wanted to do justice to the world and make their vision of it feel like an authentic continuation. My personal favourite is when Jack returns to Christmas Town and he starts singing What’s This but with new lyrics reflecting his need to save this place of light and joy. It’s a delicious callback that reflects his character development in the time since he first tumbled through that door.
The purpose of Oogie’s Revenge as a sequel feels superceded by its purpose as a video game adaptation. The plot itself introduces no new characters; Oogie’s back and is causing trouble. The core intent of Oogie’s Revenge is that fans of the movie finally get to play a video game that immerses them in the spaces and locales of Halloween Town. To be able to run against the moon under Spiral Hill instead of just seeing it on the movie screen.
And to its credit, Oogie’s Revenge takes this angle beautifully, irising in on building out every nook and cranny that we saw in the movie and giving us a space to play within them.
I said irising in, and that is something a bit inevitable with any media; your focus on one element will necessarily subtract the amount of focus you can give other elements in that same moment. All storytelling deals with this – hell, all art and media in general. Constructing a world or a story or a song will always be anchored around what elements do and do not get included, and that forms the aim and intent of the art.
In Oogie’s Revenge’s case, the lack of new areas and regions of Nightmare’s world in the game lays bare its intent: to give you the spaces of the movie to play within. There’s a teensy bit of new content – the final boss takes place in this massive wasteland filled with the garbage and detritus of holidays past, all mashed up together in a way that feels conceptually reminiscent of the Dreg Heap from Dark Souls 3, and I appreciate that, but for the vast majority of its time, Oogie’s Revenge is aimed at letting you play what you saw in the movie, and its shoestring plot is there to facilitate that.
To that end, characters in Oogie’s Revenge generally begin and end the game exactly as they were in the film. There is no particular character growth to be had here because the purpose is the playable world and the characters as they were in the movie. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a delightful game that does exactly what it sets out to do, because it understands exactly what it wants to be.
I mention all that because the other Nightmare Before Christmas ‘sequel’ we’re looking at is, in terms of creator intent, the polar opposite of Oogie’s Revenge in just about every way.
The novel Long Live The Pumpkin Queen by Shea Ernshaw is precisely what one is inclined to think of when we think about what a sequel ‘should’ be: it continues the story from the film, yes, but as it goes, it pushes the characters’ development forward, it explores more of the world, introduces new elements and characters, and most importantly, it pulls back the curtain and reveals more about the Forest than ever before, answering questions that we mightn’t have thought to ask but whose answers feel completely appropriate and natural, and leaves the world in a very different state than when Ernshaw found it.
Where the original film was about Jack’s disaffection with his role in life and his need to reinvent himself, Pumpkin Queen centers Sally the rag roll, finding herself gripped by her own disaffection with the new role that Halloween Town now expects of her.
Like Jack before her, Sally’s journey beyond the bounds of her town leads her to new discoveries and a bespoke quest. I really don’t want to spoil the whole thing because it’s a great book and if you’re just discovering its existence through me, you should really just go snap it up for yourself.
But suffice it to say, while a novel continuing the story of Nightmare Before Christmas decades after the fact is necessarily going to make many of us hella nostalgic, Ernshaw’s sequel is disinterested in dwelling solely in that realm. Jack is here, as are the other familiar faces, but Pumpkin Queen is far more interested in pushing beyond the veil into what new discoveries we may yet make beyond the spindly corridors we already know.
We finally get a more proper look at the other holiday realms (and Valentine’s Town presents some interesting worldbuilding in the short amount of time we have with it), but it goes so much further. There’s a new villain whose unleashing has consequences for all Forest realms and the human world too; there’s a new Forest door that leads to a new realm that fits beautifully into the mythos, expanding it to concepts beyond simple holidays.
I would venture to say – without spoiling it – that the revelations Sally experiences in Pumpkin Queen move her character, and the broader world, forward even moreso than Jack’s in the original movie.
Because a great sequel doesn’t have its mind on merely reheating what we already have; it forges its own identity and justifies itself in ways that are self-evident. This is especially important when it’s an unplanned sequel. That’s an important distinction – some stories are meant from the start to be told in multiple parts, developed and paced as such, and others are continued after the fact. Pumpkin Queen is one such continuation, opening the door back up after an ending we’ve all internalized, communicating to us that the world we loved that first time we saw it as kids has still been going and ticking in its own nature long after the last cinematic frames held it pernally in a sort of emotional stasis.
And as it’s a novel rather than a game, Ernshaw understands that the iris needs to be on engrossing us in the continuing story. We’ve all got our home copies of The Nightmare Before Christmas if we need a refresher on what’s already happened.
Emotional choices are made; some characters’ true selves are revealed in ways that make the original film hit different in hindsight. (Again without spoiling it, every single skeevy douchechill you got from Doctor Finkelstein in the movie was justified in ways we didn’t know the whole of until now.)
New themes arrive, playing harmoniously with the themes of the movie before it. Just as Jack had to learn the hard way that not every skillset works for every situation, Sally comes to learn a newfound balance within herself, coming to understand that the worlds of nightmares and dreams are not dissonant, but two parts of a whole.
And at the end of the story, I found myself yearning for more from this new worldstate we find ourselves in.
Which does beg the question: if there ever was to be a cinematic sequel to The Nightmare Before Christmas, I suspect it might end up overwriting Pumpkin Queen as far as canonicity goes, similarly to how the Disney Star Wars era overwrote the previous expanded universe material, simply because I am guessing the novel probably slipped under the radar for most people compared to a big cinematic release with a big promotional push you just can’t ignore, and the studio heads would 100% be vying for that wider audience install base who had seen the original film and nothing else.
We’re definitely in the never-say-never phase when it comes to movies like this, after all; with a Beetlejuice sequel of all things now behind us, it probably won’t be terribly long before marquees are lighting up with showings of a Beetlejuice Beetlejuice B-
-Sorry, frog in the throat there. But anyhow, if that did end up happening and Pumpkin Queen went the Star Wars: Legends route, I would have deeply mixed feelings. Because I love Long Live The Pumpkin Queen. It is exemplary as a sequel that carries the beating heart of the original into a new form that expands rather than diminishes its world. And I’m overjoyed that Ernshaw chose to iris in on the things that make continuations of our stories such an important and taken-for-granted aspect of the storytelling universe.
And might that have happened so fluidly if Pumpkin Queen had instead been a film? Once you attach a hefty budget to a thing and the money-mongers start overseeing production, suddenly there are demands and expectations and not everybody might be on the same page. What if someone up top had said you can’t center Sally without making Jack the lead again, or you need this, or you need that, or you can’t do this, or you can’t have that?
Could it be that presenting this sequel as a smaller-scale novel release instead of a big-budget follow-up gave Ernshaw the kind of freedom to tell exactly the story she wanted to tell? (To say nothing of how presenting it as a novel that fans sort of need to seek out, as opposed to a blockbuster film launch, spares it from the inevitable teeth-gnashing of the disaffection-poisoned cynicism machine that is modern media discourse; Bluesky would be yelling at clouds in disgust that a thing they like is going to get more of itself, while the swastika-branded Lament Configuration formerly known as Twitter would be going off about…well, you know. You just know.)
That’s not to say a story identical to Ernshaw’s take couldn’t have been done as a video game as well; games are a wonderfully diverse method for storytelling, and even though I’ve talked about how Oogie’s Revenge centers playable nostalgia as the driving force behind its design, there’s very little if any of Long Live The Pumpkin Queen that wouldn’t work as a game, done right.
Hell, the intersectionality of media forms is pretty well totally fluid these days; it’s right there in the name that a visual novel could be expressed as a novel-novel, save for the choose-your-response elements that tend to be present. (And even then, choose your own adventure novels are completely a thing.) Music tells stories; narratives have an ebb and flow that can be so harmonious it’s almost musical.
Maybe it’s a testament to the strong, iconic nature of Nightmare’s world that it holds up in the realms of film, music, game and novel. To answer the question I floated about the aim of a sequel, I think it also says something that both the nostalgia-focused game that keeps us where things were at film’s end, and the forward-thinking novel that forges ahead to expand the lore and drive the story ahead, feel welcome and appropriate additions to the Nightmare world. At the end of the day, if it’s good, it’s good. Happy Halloween, and may your nightmares and dreams ever be in balance.
…
…What do you mean there’s a sequel novel to Long Live The Pumpkin Queen, just out this year, something I only found out while doing final edits on this. Now that’s what I call a proper cliffhanger-
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Everything beyond this point was written a few days after this originally went up, as I didn’t realize at the time that within four days, I’d have ordered and received Megan Shepherd’s Hour Of The Pumpkin Queen, ravenously tearing through every last page until I was ready to add this bit of free DLC to this article.
It’s great. It is as worthy a follow-up to Long Live The Pumpkin Queen as that one is to Nightmare itself, and I do mean that by the parameters that we’ve been talking about here: we’re treated to the repercussions and natural consequences of the worldbuilding expansions that have been established thus far, while staying true to the original themes that underpin the series. Continuing a story from where it left off, be it by your own hand or in this case by its last steward, is just as much of a skill as beginning a story and building that world to begin with, and Hour Of The Pumpkin Queen shows that skill in teachable action.
To that end (and with my still endeavoring to not spoil any real specifics), multiple major characters on this journey grapple continuously with their pull to their proscribed nature while yearning to be more than what the tales have set out for them, much like how this all began, with Jack discovering there was more than what he knew and yearning to be something more multifaceted than just the king of scares.
It’s the way this journey weaves in those constant themes that keeps things feeling powerfully tethered, even as the story is the most ambitious Nightmare yet, fulfilling the promise of the last pages of the past novel and bringing us an adventure that cuts through the fabric of time.
The notion repeated throughout the book, that monsters do not have to be villains, is a thing that already rings familiar to any fans of the series. But it also goes a place the film perhaps did not; that some monsters are monsters not because they look scary or because of where they’re from, but because they do cruel, monstrous things. Shepherd’s exploration of Dr. Finkelstein’s impact on Sally’s life, and her repeated attempts to reconcile what she’s lived through, takes us to a place of hauntingly realistic, genuine trauma. In these scenes, Sally might as well not be a rag-doll of dreams and nightmares; she might be someone you know. It’s so realistic that it’s stark.
Without spoiling anything about the ending, I will say it sets us up for another one at least, and I have to say, that realization left me feeling quite good about the fact that I’m now following The Nightmare Before Christmas series in real time, as more of the curtain peels back to show more of this fascinating world of scares, fables, dreams and nightmares.
What’s interesting about that new framing – of Nightmare Before Christmas as an ongoing series with more mysteries to uncover rather than a one-and-done – is that by a two to one ratio, Sally is now effectively the main character of the story rather than Jack. But then I thought, Hour is wrapped up in constant questions of belonging, or not belonging, and questioning where you truly fit in. It’s a theme carrying on from the thrust of the film, where Jack grappled with similar questions.
But perhaps Sally is the proper player to carry these themes forward, considering she is literally a patchwork creation, previously gifted by Ernshaw with the additional depth and context of Dream Town, and made by Shepherd into the full-fledged torch bearer for those questions that have underpinned the series since the final notes faded on the perennial Halloween carol that saw us into the film. It makes the original film even richer in hindsight, especially Sally’s role; another mark of a sequel that feels not only earned, but natural.
So with the knowledge that this is a ‘living series’, I can hardly wait for our next Nightmare.