Worm’s Wort Optional: The Nightmare Before Christmas Fans’ Mimetic Food Craft as Tactile Transmedia, Auteur Affirmation, and Transformative Translocation

Building on the limited research into The Nightmare Before Christmas fandom (Hills 2013; Thompson 2014; Singleton 2019), this chapter explores fans’ film-centred food practices. Compared to the well-documented digital affordances for storytelling, distribution, and business partnerships (Freeman and Gambarato 2019), transmedia’s physical and haptic qualities for worldbuilding and audience immersion are underexplored (Rehak 2014; Williams 2020). Concurrently, studies of food in horror and food fandom are hungry for further critical attention (Piatti-Farnell 2017; Reinhard et al. 2021). Addressing these points, this chapter focuses on Nightmare fans’ culinary practices as a form of ‘tactile transmediality’ (Santo 2018), where food provides the ‘diegetic portal’ (Atkinson 2019: 19) that extends the storyworld into kitchens. Analysing online food blogs and vlogs, the chapter applies Hills’ (2014) mimetic fan craft model to Godwin’s (2021) taxonomy of cookery practices. The first half of the chapter begins by examining fans’ employment of scopic regimes to create ‘themed’ foods that use edible ingredients in the transmedial crafting of inedible diegetic objects, characters, and scenes from the film. In doing so, fans become ‘co-producer[s] in the dramaturgy of the meal’ (Abrams 2013: 9) that also affirms Tim Burton’s dark quirky aesthetics and his status as an auteur (McMahan 2006; Bassil-Morozow 2010; Taylor 2013). The chapter’s second half then explores Feast of Fiction’s YouTube video for recreating Sally’s poisoned soup that allows her to escape Dr Finkelstein. Whilst this culinary craft stresses aesthetic mimesis ergo visual authenticity, the central inedible food horror is not translated verbatim from screen to plate. Therefore, such transformative food craft as a transmedial object requires ‘translocation’ (Chiaro 2008), where diegetic toxic components are replaced with tasty ingredients. As a result, epicurean sensations are maintained, producing ironic distance between the comestible and the fictional horror dish it mimics that echoes the film’s horror-comedy sensibilities.