The Long Sleigh Ride of 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' to the Silver Screen (2024)

Another Halloween season, another reason to break out The Nightmare Before Christmas. Jack Skellington and friends have duly taken over the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland and Tokyo Disneyland, and Danny Elfman is leading a 30th anniversary concert celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. It’s quite the show of mainstream acceptance towards a movie that was once a cast-off to Disney’s Touchstone arm. But then, Nightmare has always worked on long timetables. Just winning a chance to make the film was a nearly ten-year trek, with another two years in production. But the journey was worth it, given how meaningful Nightmare became for the three key creative forces behind the picture.

Nightmare Before Christmas Was a Turning Point for Tim Burton and Danny Elfman

For creator-producer Tim Burton, Nightmare was among his earliest projects. Growing up in suburban Burbank, with its perpetually sunny weather, Burton felt disconnected from the seasons until the holidays came into town, bringing with them department store decorations. “It gave you some sort of texture all of a sudden that wasn’t there before,” he recalled. Halloween and Christmas were his favorites growing up; Halloween had monsters, and Christmas had TV specials like How the Grich Stole Christmas and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The latter was done in the stop-motion animation technique Burton already loved from the films of Ray Harryhausen. This was the form he chose to experiment with was an animator at Disney. Burton’s short film “Vincent,” narrated by Vincent Price himself, gave him his first shot at directing, and he wanted to follow it up with another stop-motion project based on a poem he had written from those childhood holiday memories – “The Nightmare before Christmas.”

The tale picked up some thematic complexity on the way from boyhood observations. Jack Skellington wasn’t just an inverted Grinch; he was a king disillusioned with his realm of Halloweenland and completely oblivious to any consequences his plan to commandeer Christmas might have. “I like that kind of character that’s passionate but doesn’t know what he’s doing,” said Burton. “I think it’s a reaction against the kind of society you grow up with, where people don’t feel a lot or go out on a limb a lot.” Burton was certainly going out on a limb pitching the concept to the Disney of the early ‘80s; a stop motion passion project about a manic-depressive skeleton’s midlife crisis was like nothing else on their slate. To top it off, Burton deliberately subverted the unwritten “eyes for expression” rule of animation by designing Jack without eyeballs. He hoped initially for a more elaborate version of “Vincent,” narrated by Price. “Back then I think I would have done it as anything,” he told biographer Mark Salisbury. “A television special, a short film – whatever would have gotten it done.” But Disney wouldn’t bite – not until Burton left the studio, won fame and fortune culminating in Batman, and started being referred to by the Hollywood press as “the leader in a post-Spielberg generation of filmmakers.” It wasn’t a position Burton sought or wanted; his production company, seen as a “younger, hipper version” of Amblin Entertainment, fizzled in a matter of years. But in the early 90s, he did use his newfound clout to coax Disney onto that stop-motion limb he developed a decade earlier.

For composer Danny Elfman, Nightmare became an outlet for his own identity crisis. He was well into his second career as a film composer, but his first – front man for the rock group Oingo Boingo – still weighed on him. “[I was] king of my own world,” he said, but “I felt like Jack from where I was in life … I wanted out” (Oingo Boingo disbanded in 1995, two years after Nightmare’s release). Film scoring was Elfman’s Christmastown, and he had already settled into the role of Burton’s composer of choice. But Nightmare was the first musical for either man, and they didn’t know how to start. All they had to work with was Burton’s poem, his artwork, and an adaptation by screenwriter Michael McDowell that wasn’t working. So they figured: “Let’s just start writing songs!” Burton would report to Elfman’s house with fresh drawings and tell him part of the story, prompting musical ideas in Elfman’s mind. He would shoo Burton out of the house and start writing. On Burton’s next visit, they would review Elfman’s work from last time, then move on to the next section of the story.

The result was a musical more akin to Gilbert and Sullivan than Broadway, an operetta that got over nearly every major character turn through song. As those songs came together through rewriting and demo tapes, Elfman grew more and more attached to the role of Jack Skellington – and loathe to hand it off to anyone else. “I hadn’t started out thinking it was for me, but by the end…I go up to [Tim], I go, ‘You know, Tim, I don’t know how to say this, but Jack – these songs -’ and he goes, ‘Danny, don’t worry. You’re doing it.’”

Nightmare Launched Henry Selick's Feature Film Career

For director Henry Selick, Nightmare was his first feature film. Like Burton, he studied at CalArts and was drafted by Disney in the early 80s. Also like Burton, Selick was frustrated and underutilized by the management of the time. A fellow devotee of stop-motion but possessed with enough patience to routinely work with the technique, Selick established a base in San Francisco, directing segments for music videos and television commercials. He built up a core team of top animators who were ready, willing, and able to take on a full-length project. Burton was committed to Batman Returns (and not keen for the length and intensity directing an animated project would entail) and put in the call: would Selick be interested? Selick didn’t need much convincing; he’d seen the development work for Nightmare at Disney and loved it.

“Henry is a real artist,” Burton told Salisbury. “He’s truly the best.” With no more knowledge of how to start a musical than his producer and composer, Selick happily dove into production with just three of Elfman’s songs. He and his story team fleshed the film out in visual terms while his animators labored to meet the (in animation terms) tight schedule and budget. All the while, Burton’s clout – and geography – kept studio interference at bay. “It was important for me to stay away from Los Angeles,” Selick insisted. “I think that if Disney and even Tim had too much access to us, they would have gotten too nervous and gummed up the works.” Speaking of the working relationship he had with his producer, Selick said that “it’s as though [Burton] laid the egg, and I sat on it and hatched it.” Burton told Salisbury that his main concern was “that Henry, being an artist in his own right, wouldn’t do the things I wanted ... [b]ut it wasn’t like that. He was great.”

Which isn't to say there was never tension over the two years of production. Burton’s hope of involving Vincent Price fell apart when Price, sick and despondent over his wife’s passing, couldn’t manage the role of Santa Claus in Selick’s estimation (the role went to Ed Ivory instead). Selick also felt that Elfman, while excellent as Jack’s singing voice, didn’t have the same energy in straight dialogue. Replacing Elfman with Chris Sarandon required Burton’s approval, and there were hurt feelings when Burton sided with his director. And an attempt by Selick to throw in a twist at the end regarding the identity of Oogie Boogie saw Burton put his foot through a wall.

The Writing of Nightmare Was Contentious

It was the plotting and screenwriting of Nightmare that seems to have been the most contentious process, one that took its toll on everyone involved. Screenwriter Caroline Thompson, Burton’s writer on Edward Scissorhands and Elfman’s then-girlfriend, was brought in to write the script, but only after most of the songs were completed and animation had begun. She has claimed that what little work McDowell had done prior to her hiring was unusable bordering on nonexistent; "he took his salary up his nose and wrote nothing," she told The Holiday Movies That Made Us.

Just how much of the finished story and dialogue can be credited to Thompson is a little fuzzy. She's conceded that Elfman's songs do much of the storytelling, at least as far as Jack is concerned. She and Elfman have conflicting memories of how he reacted to the first draft. And Selick once claimed to Sight & Sound magazine that “there are very few lines of dialogue that are Caroline’s. She became busy on other films and we were constantly re-writing.” But Thompson has also said that she is largely responsible for the character of Sally, who was thinly sketched in earlier material with a more voluptuous design. Thompson pulled Sally in a more sensitive direction, inspired by the fairy tale of the Little Match Girl, and Elfman later added "Sally's Song" to his work.

There Was More Fighting in Post-production

Reflecting after the fact, Burton told Salisbury that the late stages of Nightmare's production saw him, Selick, Elfman, and Thompson acting like “a bunch of kids, fighting.” Besides his argument with Selick over Oogie Boogie, he got into a row with Thompson over what was needed for Jack and Sally's romance and took his frustrations out on an editing machine. Selick, who as since been more complimentary to Thompson's work, at one point accused her of ruining the movie. And Thompson had her own concerns about Oogie Boogie. To this day, she thinks the villain has uncomfortable racist overtones in looks (she sees a Ku Klux Klan hood in his design) and name ("boogie" is an old Southern derogatory slang term for Black people). She unsuccessfully tried to convince Selick and Burton to change the character. Selick defended Oogie at the time; in his Sight & Sound interview, he said that Oogie's voice, Black actor Ken Page, had no issues with the part, and he's since cited the Cab Calloway-led cartoons of the Fleischer brothers as inspiration.

Even the film's title became a point of contention. Originally meant to be a Disney film released as The Nightmare Before Christmas, it became a Touchstone project titled Tim Burton's Nightmare... very late in the game, something that Selick found "a little unfair...I would have been fine with that, if that’s what I signed up for. But Tim was in L.A. making two features while I directed that film... it was really me and my team of people who brought that to life."

Burton did exercise a hand in post-production, though. He made trims, adjusted the pace, and got into one more argument with Selick, this time about the songs. With ten numbers, Nightmare is well over the norm for an animated musical, and Selick worried that so many numbers would lose the audience. Unlike the fight over Jack's speaking voice, Burton didn’t back Selick on this. He insisted that all the songs be animated, with the option to pull back later. As it happened, the two ended up switching positions in post, the director now insisting that every song “had become such an integral part of the film – character development, the emotional center and just basic storytelling – that I felt there would be a huge hole.” Twenty-eight years later, with Elfman headlining live concert performances and the movie more accepted at Halloween and Christmas than poor Jack ever was, it’s hard to argue otherwise.