These Secrets About The Nightmare Before Christmas Are All Treats
Originally appeared on E! Online
What's this, you ask?
Well, no trick, it's an ode to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Which, holiday shout-out in the title aside, is a Halloween movie.
Because Jack Skellington, for all his heartfelt interest in how Christmas works, is the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town. And he eventually realizes toward the end of the 1993 animated classic that he shouldn't quit his day job.
Plus there are all those skeletons, ghouls, monsters, wonky-eyed creatures and an endlessly chic rag doll heroine, making the film perfect for rewatching during spooky season and a source of endless inspiration for costumes.
"I think kids like to be a bit scared," Catherine O'Hara, the voice of Jack's resourceful beloved Sally, told E! News in 1993, "as long as there's something right after that says everything's OK."
And yet moviegoers didn't quite pack the theaters 31 years ago, though they—and, more recently, their children—have long since come to appreciate the magic of Tim Burton's vision, painstakingly brought to vivid life by director Henry Selick, screenwriter Caroline Johnson and Danny Elfman, who composed all the music and provided Jack's singing voice.
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"I think of it more as a Halloween movie, but it really is about Christmas," Elfman mused to TIME in 2016. "Regardless, it's just that weird thing that sometimes happens where a film continues a kind of cult life after it comes out."
Though the movie only scared up about $50 million at the box office during its initial release, countless fans have since packed venues for live sing-alongs and lined up to meet the talent behind the film at conventions all over the country.
"I just happened to hit the lottery, quite frankly," Chris Sarandon—whose infectious "Eureka!" as the speaking voice of Jack Skellington remains the film's most iconic line—told ComicBook.com in 2019. All these years later, he added, "I'm constantly feeling a humility and a gratefulness for being a part of it."
And here comes Halloween! So, you can believe your eyes, you are not dreaming, this really is a sleigh filled with secrets about the making of The Nightmare Before Christmas:
What's This?!
Tim Burton was working for Walt Disney Animation Studios in the early 1980s when he dreamed up The Nightmare Before Christmas, a riff on the classic poem "The Night Before Christmas" (first published in 1823 as "A Visit From St. Nicholas"), and drew the first iteration of Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloweentown.
He pitched the idea to Disney as a TV special, but the look he envisioned wasn't the Mouse House's bag, though the studio hung onto the rights to the story about Jack's well-intentioned but ultimately too-scary attempt to take over Christmas.
Once Burton had become a really big deal, Disney did make the film, but it was released in 1993 by subsidiary Touchstone Pictures.
The Guy Behind the Guy
The Nightmare Before Christmas may automatically conjure visions of Burton dancing in our heads, but the film was written by Edward Scissorhands scribe Caroline Thompson and directed by stop-motion specialist Henry Selick.
He and Burton met as students at CalArts, then worked together at Disney.
"Tim's a genius for the ideas, the designs, and all the things that really do matter, but he wanted somebody else to direct it," Selick told the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences' A.frame in 2023. "I'd done some hand-drawn animation. And later I've done some computer [animation], but I just love stop-motion. I love moving those puppets around."
Top Billing Blues
While he's always applauded Burton's vision, Selick made some waves in 2022 when he acknowledged to AV Club that he felt it was "a little unfair" when Disney started billing the film as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas a few weeks before its release.
"And I would have been fine with that," he said, "if that's what I signed up for."
Burton "is a genius—or he certainly was in his most creative years," Selick added. "I always thought his story was perfect, and he designed the main characters. But it was really me and my team of people [based in San Francisco] who brought that to life."
Eventually, Selick noted, Burton "showed up at the end with an editor and trimmed out some stuff to tighten up the film."
To All a Good Night
A year after his "unfair" comment made headlines, Selick insisted it really wasn't that big of a deal to him…anymore.
It bothered him "a bit in the past," he told People in 2023, but "it's not really a problem…For the most part, at least everyone in the industry, everyone in animation, know it's me who directed it."
More Than the Sum of Its Parts
The Nightmare Before Christmas became the first feature-length film comprising only stop-motion animation.
And it took more than three years to make, Selick's team moving their handmade puppets incrementally and photographing them frame by frame, producing one minute of film per week.
He attributed the painstaking process to not knowing any better at the time.
"We just weren't afraid," the director told Simon Bland for Total Film in 2023. "We were ignorant and blissful."
What's In a Face?
More than 3,000 hand-sculpted heads were created for Jack Skellington alone because, according to Selick, he had 300 distinct expressions, plus, he told A.frame, there were "in-between expressions and multiple copies, so multiple scenes could be shot at once."
Impressive Stitchwork
Selick didn't just do the visuals frame-by-frame, millisecond by millisecond.
"He does the voice work that way, too, especially with a character like Sally—a patchwork being," Catherine O'Hara, who voiced rag doll Sally, Jack's crafty love interest, told The Edge in 2013. "My dialogue was patchworked together, too, with bits of sentences constructed into 'Sally speak.'"
O'Hara "didn't like how many takes [it took]," Selick, calling the actress "an incredible comedian," told People. "I had to do a lot of takes to get her in the zone. But she did beautifully."
Going With the Flow
O'Hara has never had a cross word to say (publicly, at least) about the filming process.
"To go into the studio was a thrilling and mind-boggling thing,” O'Hara told the Los Angeles Daily News in 2023 of working with Selick in San Francisco. "In one shot, five seconds of a scene, I think that’s like a week's work. When you see the movie it’s just so beautiful and fluid and realistic in its own little world. You just forget all that work, but I really do appreciate it."
Pitch Imperfect
At first she "tried to do more of a broken voice," O'Hara told E! News in 1993, "her voice as stitched up as her body, but that kind of thing can get in the way after awhile."
In her duet with Elfman in particular, "I wanted to sing higher than I'm used to," O'Hara said, "because it seemed right for Sally. At some points I'd sound like, you know, [in a high timid register] a choir boy."
She added with a smile, "I excused it by saying Sally's not that well-formed, so she can't sing that well."
It's a Wonderful Liveliness
Director of photography Pete Kozachik designed custom motion control rigs for the film so it would have the feel of a live-action movie.
Earning His Stripes
"Tim did a couple of sketches of Jack in the '80s inspired by Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family," Selick told Total Film. "Production Designer Rick Heinrichs did the first sculpture of Jack and captured Tim's drawings beautifully. Then it was all about how to animate him."
Jack was "impossibly thin," he continued, "so making him into a stop-motion character was hard. We used metal armatures like skeletons underneath his clothing. He was all in black and that didn’t read--since so much of Halloweentown is dark, he disappeared. So I added vertical stripes."
Haunting Presence
Selick has paid homage to Jack in every film he's directed since. "If you look very, very carefully, you might find that there's some image of Jack in every other film I've made," he told GamesRadar+ in August. "But I can't legally say that's true, but it might be true."
For instance, the captain of a band of skeletal pirates in James and the Giant Peach is called "Skellington," and when The Other Mother makes eggs in Coraline, the pattern of the yolk resembles Jack's face.
Music to His Ears
Jack's singing voice was provided by frequent Burton collaborator Danny Elfman, who also composed the film's score and all 10 of its original songs, from "Here Comes Halloween" to "What's This?"
Going for a timeless vibe, "I wanted it to sound like it was written 50 or 100 years ago," Elfman told Billboard in 2018, "so I turned my own influences for that stuff. Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which was a major thing in my life, was a source, as well musicals from Cole Porter and Gershwin, and to a certain extent, Rodgers and Hammerstein."
Pee-wees in a Pod
The Nightmare Before Christmas was already the sixth film Elfman and Burton had worked on together, their still-going creative partnership (2024's Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice is their latest) dating back to 1985's Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
"The funny thing about Tim and I starting The Nightmare Before Christmas is that neither of us had any idea how to do a musical animated film," Elfman told Little White Lies in 2018. "When Tim brought me in there was no script, so we started telling the story with songs and the script came afterwards—we did it all backwards, but it made sense to us."
Burton would show him his drawings, Elfman recalled, "and as he would describe the scene I'd start to hear the song. It was really quick and simple. He provided all the imagery I needed to get inspired."
Danny's Lament
Elfman, as the frontman of new wave band Oingo Boingo, identified with Jack's wish for more despite already being successful at the job he's got.
"When you’re the leader of a band it's like you are The Pumpkin King," he told Little White Lies. "You're the leader of your own little microverse and I totally got his desire of, 'I’m not happy anymore and I don’t know what I want to do but I need something.' When I was writing for Jack, I was also writing for myself. I was singing him almost semi-autobiographically. I injected a lot of myself in there and it made it more personal."
Toning It Down
Vibing with Jack aside, Elfman "didn't really have the chops for the dialogue," Selick told People in 2023. So, they had to find a voice that was "close enough to Danny's that it could pass."
Chris Sarandon, of Fright Night and The Princess Bride fame, fit the bill.
"I think it helped a lot to hear Danny’s voice singing the songs," Sarandon told CT Insider in 2023, recalling that the music was pretty much done by the time he headed up to San Francisco to speak for Jack. "It was a challenge, to a certain extent, but at the same time, I think in terms of the vocal match we were pretty close."
And he only had to audition once.
Kid-Tested, Actor-Approved
Sarandon sensed early on that he was part of something special.
"I remember the first time I took a look at it, I saw it in black and white," he recalled on the Today Show Australia in 2023.
"I was going into the studio with Tim Burton to redo some of the lines, and as I'm watching this black and white muddy version of it, my three young children had gathered beside me, unbeknownst to me, and their mouths were just, like, totally agape."
So the finished product really blew him away when he attended the premiere with his kids Stephanie, Alexis and Michael (whose mom is his ex-wife Lisa Ann Cooper).
"I was really back against my seat, just going, 'Whoa, what is this?'" he told ComicBook.com. "This is just something that's just completely, totally unique.'"
Bonded for Life
While Sarandon has described working on the film as a pretty solitary experience, the process not really necessitating much face time with his costars, he formed an enduring bond with the late Ken Page, who voiced Oogie Boogie.
"Very close friends as a result of our having done a number of Comic-Cons together," Sarandon told CT Insider in 2023. "We've spent more and more time together and he's one of my closest friends, which is an added bonus."
Page told the publication at the time, "I really treasure my friendship with Chris because now it's been 30 years. And that’s a long time to have any constant contact with anybody. I call him my road husband."
After his sudden passing on Sept. 30, 2024, Sarandon paid tribute on Instagram: "We've lost a giant of a man: actor, singer, director, human. Goodbye with great sadness to my dear friend, Ken Page."
Turning Heads
Page, who did all the voice work for the villainous Oogie Boogie, thought he would just be asked to sing.
"They asked me about the character and what did I think," the Broadway star, who originated the role of Old Deuteronomy in Cats, recalled to CT Insider. "I had seen some of the storyboards. I said, 'To me, maybe it's a cross between Burt Lahr from The Wizard of Oz, Cab Calloway and the voice of the demon in The Exorcist."
It turned out to be an excellent day for an audition.
Family Reunion
O'Hara figured she was offered the role of Sally because she and Burton "had a good time" working together on 1988's Beetlejuice.
"So he very kindly offered me the part of Sally," the Schitt's Creek star told the LA Daily News in 2023. "Then I went in to record with Danny, and that was exciting and scary. And we also got to do a Lock, Shock and Barrell song ['Dear Sandy Claws'] with dear Paul [Reubens]," who voiced Lock.
What O'Hara did not do was assume that the film would become a holiday classic. "You try to get involved with good people, work on a good script, and have some fun," she said. "You never really know what will happen."
The Heart and Soul of It
O'Hara attributed the film's enduring popularity to its universal themes, often present in Burton's work, about the well-intentioned outsider who "just wants to be appreciated and loved."
Jack is "a freak, but not a freak," she told the Daily News. "He's a sweet soul. Like Edward Scissorhands, and so many characters in Tim's movies. So yes, the art, the music and the sweetness of it."
Sarandon had a similar take, telling People in 2023, "A lot of young people come up to me and say, 'This was a movie that made me feel like I belonged,' because it was so strange and at the same time so beautiful, and its message was so positive. And as it turns out, they, in turn, now are watching it with their children."
Jack was "perceived as dark, but is really light," Burton told Empire in 2023. "Those are the kinds of things that I love, whether it's Scissorhands or Batman, characters that have that. It represented all those feelings that I had. I was perceived as this dark character, when I didn't feel that way. So it was a very personal character."
That's All, Folks
Asked if there was any talk of making a sequel, Selick said a prequel would make more sense, since Burton considered The Nightmare Before Christmas to be "a perfect movie," the director told People in 2023. And, the director added, "there might be a more interesting story there about how Jack became the King of Halloweentown."
Sarandon, who's continued to voice Jack in video games, theme park attractions and other licensed content, told People he'd "be there in a minute" should they need his vocal talents for another film.
But about a month later, Burton confirmed there'd be no sequel on his watch.
"I've done sequels, I’ve done other things, I’ve done reboots, I’ve done all that s--t, right? I don't want that to happen to this," he told Empire. "It's nice that people are maybe interested, but I’m not. I feel like that old guy who owns a little piece of property and won't sell to the big power plant that wants to take my land. 'Get off of my land! You pesky little… You ain’t getting this property! I don’t care what you want to build on it. You come on my property… Where's my shotgun?'"