Jack Skellington - Jack in The Nightmare Before Christmas

Jack in The Nightmare Before Christmas

Jack Skellington is the patron spirit of Halloween, portrayed as being on par with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny within his own holiday. As a living skeleton, he is immortal and can remove parts of his body without harm, as is often demonstrated for comic relief. He is the most important of many Halloween spirits, with the implication that their job is to scare people in the real world on Halloween night.

Jack, as the Pumpkin King, is in charge of Halloween Town's Halloween celebration, a role for which he receives respect and admiration from the other residents. However, monologued with himself reveals he is growing tired of celebrating the same holiday endlessly and is very depressed about it. The only one who understands Jack's feelings is a lonely, sweet-hearted, loyal and very pretty ragdoll girl named Sally who is a very close friend of Jack's and she understands him because she is in a very similar situation herself. Jack's sense of adventure is stimulated when he accidentally discovers Christmas Town, driving him to start a Christmas celebration of his own. While his intentions are good, Jack does not understand the true spirit of Christmas, and he and his friends give it a macabre make-over, however it is destined to miserably fail. This failure is predicted by Sally early on in the film and she does try very hard to warn (and later stop) Jack, but he never listens. As the film goes on it is shown that Jack and Sally become very strongly attracted to one another and by the end have completely fallen for each other.

The official film soundtrack CD contains an epilogue not in the film, stating that "many years later" Santa returned to Halloween Town to visit Jack, where he discovered that Jack had "four or five skeleton children at hand" who play together in a xylophone band. By many fans of the movie and of the franchise it is strongly assumed that Jack and Sally married and that the children are theirs.