Home Horror Horror Retros What’s This, What’s This? ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ Turns 25

What’s This, What’s This? ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ Turns 25

October 31, 2018

Everyone has their favorite Tim Burton movie. Whether it’s the legendary director’s first feature length film, 1985’s Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, the 1988 horror classic Beetlejuice, or his weird and wonderful take on the Dark Knight, Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).

Whatever your taste in Burton’s eccentric, odd and creepy take on cinema, there’s no doubt The Nightmare Before Christmas has held a special place in your heart for the last 25 years. What better time to look back at the history of the movie, and what makes it such a cult classic today.

Just like a few other Burton projects, The Nightmare Before Christmas didn’t start life as a feature film. It was originally a three-page poem, written by Burton after completing the endearing short film, Vincent, while he worked at Walt Disney Feature Animation. The plan was to turn the poem into a TV movie, but it was turned down by TV execs. Later finding out that Disney still had the rights to the film, Burton, and director Henry Selick (yep – despite plastering his name all over it, Burton did not direct the movie! He did create and produce it, though) got to work on the movie, adding frequent collaborator Danny Elfman to the mix, in charge of writing and recording the soundtrack.

Utilizing 20 sound stages, the crew created 230 model sets. Jack Skellington had over 400 heads alone, displaying his many emotions (and to think Disney fought for him to have eyes because they thought he’d appear emotionless!). For all you stop-motion animation nerds, they shot at 24 frames per second, creating unique motions for a total of 110,000 frames. One minute of the movie took a full week to shoot, and the movie took THREE YEARS to complete. It must have been worth it though, for Henry and the whole crew’s labor of love to be adored by so many all these years later.

And it really is adored, going way beyond just a movie to its millions of fans. It’s inspired everything from Disney Parks attractions, to song lyrics (Blink 182’s “I Miss You,” anyone?!), and a whole heap of merchandise. Debuting in 2001, the Californian Disneyland saw the Haunted Mansion overrun by Jack Skellington and friends, with the seasonal Haunted Mansion Holiday Nightmare overlay making it out to Tokyo Disneyland for the 2004 season. Each year since, The Nightmare Before Christmas fans have traveled from all over the world to the Disney Parks to experience Halloween Town for themselves.

There’s a never-ending supply of Nightmare merchandise wherever you go during the Halloween season, while Hot Topic must take a pretty huge percentage of their sales from the movie all year round. Plenty of merchandise has been released for this year’s milestone anniversary, including some fantastic Funko Pop! figures, and a sing-along Blu-Ray re-release of the movie, because the soundtrack deserves to be blasted out at full volume while singing along at the top of your lungs.

Danny Elfman did a fantastic job on the soundtrack, with it very much becoming its own entity, a soundtrack for Halloween itself. It’s been re-released twice, with the songs covered by the likes of Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, Marilyn Manson, Korn, and Rise Against.

Much to Disney’s dismay, we’ll probably never see an on screen sequel. Burton turned down the Mouse House’s idea of a CGI sequel in 2001. He said: “I was always very protective of Nightmare not to do sequels or things of that kind… I felt the movie had a purity to it and the people that like it… Because it’s a mass-market kind of thing, it was important to kind of keep that purity of it.” We did get the 2004 video game, The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge, though, and this year saw Tokypop debut the 20-issue Zero’s Journey – showing Jack’s darling sidekick’s story.

So, whichever side of the debate you stand on – is it a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie? – for me personally, it bridges the gap between the two holidays, carrying on my favourite season’s spoopy-ness into Yuletide – there’s no argument that the movie is an absolute classic, that all ages, from grown-up horror fan-ghouls to little terrors, can enjoy.