No Halloween since 1993 has been complete without at least one viewing of The Nightmare
Before Christmas.
But originally, Disney's disturbing lack of faith in the creepy-cute movie almost doomed
it to obscurity.
Here's how it came to be a haunted holiday classic.
The Nightmare Before Christmas took more than its title from the famous Christmas Eve poem
of a similar name.
Tim Burton wrote the first version of the story in verse, with a similar rhyming pattern.
His poem introduced Jack Skellington and Zero, and Santa was still kidnapped by some badly
behaved trick-or-treaters: but none of the other residents of Halloween Town were mentioned
by name.
Along with the poem, Burton made some early sketches of the characters.
At the time, Burton was working for the Disney animation department.
He pitched his poem to the studio as a TV special in the '80s, but Disney rejected it,
saying it wasn't their style.
Burton eventually left Disney to pursue his own projects.
Starting with 1985's Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, he went on an incredibly successful run on
the big screen, which included 1988's Beetlejuice, followed by Batman and Edward Scissorhands
the following two years after that.
With Burton having proved that his personal bizarre brand was a box office draw, Disney
became interested in investing in that weird little story he'd once told them about a skeleton
who wants to be Santa… to an extent.
Disney distanced itself from Nightmare by releasing it through its "grown up" label
Touchstone Pictures.
Finding the right feel for a story that celebrates both Christmas coziness and Halloween horror
required a wide and weird range of influences.
Burton revealed that he was inspired by the holiday specials he'd loved watching as a
kid, notably the stop-motion Christmas staple Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the 1966
animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas!
Burton said that he sees Nightmare as a reverse of the Grinch, saying:
"[It's] about this character who finds Christmas and loves it and decides to try to do it himself."
However, there are obviously also some more gothic inspirations in the characters he cooked
up.
Director Henry Selick told Yahoo that Burton was, quote, "somewhat influenced by Charles
Addams," creator of the Addams family.
The movie's art directors also wanted to channel Edward Gorey and Ronald Searle, both famous
for their macabre, stylized pen-and-ink drawings; the set's artists they would lay down clay
or plaster and scratch lines into it, which looked like drawing marks reminiscent of Gorey
and Searle's work.
Oscar-nominated composer Danny Elfman clicked instantly with Burton's vision for The Nightmare
Before Christmas, even though there was no script when Elfman was brought on.
Instead, Burton had amassed a collection of drawings and poems that served as very effective
inspiration.
"It sort of grew from the images and the story and took on a life of its own."
As Elfman told Billboard in 2018, he drew from older musical scores by Cole Porter,
George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Gilbert and Sullivan, saying
"It turned out to be the simplest writing I'd ever done.
[...] A number of times I pushed him out the door because I started hearing the songs in
my head."
Elfman ultimately took on an even greater role in the movie.
While laying down vocals on the demos, he realized he really wanted to voice Jack.
He later told MTV that Jack's predicament as the spiritual leader of a town he's no
longer truly committed to felt similar to his own situation, as the increasingly reluctant
frontman of his band, Oingo Boingo, telling E!:
"Getting very enthusiastic and then plunging down into this melancholy state — I mean,
that's me."
Fortunately, Burton agreed.
However, he brought in actor Chris Sarandon to voice Jack's non-singing scenes.
Director Selick told the Daily Beast that Elfman was hurt at having some of his vocals
replaced, and it ultimately ended up causing a years-long rift between the creative duo.
Elfman didn't score Burton's next few films, but the two made up by the time of Mars Attacks
in 1996.
When Disney finally greenlit Nightmare, Tim Burton was busy with Batman Returns.
So instead of taking the helm on his most personal project, he enlisted his friend and
fellow director, Henry Selick.
Selick and Burton had studied and worked together at animation school CalArts and Disney.
Like Burton, Selick's sensibilities leaned more spooky than cutesy.
Selick credits Burton with developing the story, the main characters, the tone, and
the look, but he was the one on set every day, managing the 120-person crew.
Still, Nightmare looks and feels like a truly typical Tim Burton movie.
Disney and Touchstone intentionally marketed the movie as Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before
Christmas.
Burton later admitted his trepidation at the marketing, and Henry Selick later told the
Daily Beast,
"That bothered me for a while.
[...] I was shoved pretty far in the background [of the title sequence], which threw me, but
it was probably a good marketing decision."
Selick went on to direct more whimsically weird stop-motion classics which people also
often mistake for being Burton's works: 1996's James and the Giant Peach - which has a Jack
Skellington cameo - and 2009's Oscar-nominated Coraline.
Even after pre-production had begun, Tim Burton had his poem and a vivid vision of The Nightmare
Before Christmas — but no script.
By July 1991, Selick and his crew had moved into a warehouse in San Francisco, and shooting
had to start on October 1, but all they had of the story was an outline and some songs.
It took about a month to write and demo all 10 musical interludes, but unable to wait
any longer, Selick started animating the three songs that were ready first, beginning with
"What's This?"
The first screenwriter tasked with combining the songs into a script was Michael McDowell,
who had co-written Beetlejuice.
"'Yow!
I got demons runnin' all through me!
All through me!'"
McDowell was ultimately too ill to finish the project.
Instead, Caroline Thompson stepped in.
She'd previously written Edward Scissorhands and 1991's The Addams Family, and would later
co-write Burton's Corpse Bride.
Thompson said that by the time she joined, all the songs were finished and they were
animating "Kidnap the Sandy Klaws."
Her first visit to the incredible set inspired a plotline.
She was fascinated by a character in Halloween Town who had flipped open his head to scratch
his brain, telling D23,
"Right then and there, Sally's story came into focus and Dr. Finkelstein was born."
Jack Skellington had been a part of The Nightmare Before Christmas since Burton's poem, but
it took a few small tweaks to get him right.
Burton's first sketches of Jack showed him as even thinner than the spindly character
we all love and slightly fear.
Burton also originally wanted Jack to be wearing all black, but that made him blend into the
twilight background of Halloween Town.
After trying a few different color palettes, Selick settled on Jack's pinstripe suit, and
the bat bowtie that was referenced in the original poem.
One thing Selick wouldn't change was Jack's face, even though Disney tried to make him
and Burton give Jack eyeballs.
Instead, as Selick explained,
"We made the sockets of his eyes [...] this dark, soft, reflective surface.
It's very subtle, but there's sort of a glow in there."
There were two major inspirations behind Jack's long-legged, graceful movements : dancer Fred
Astaire, and Selick himself.
Selick told Yahoo,
"If you ever meet me, he kind of moves like me — better than me, more Fred Astaire than
I'll ever be!"
One of the trickiest things about stop-motion is that the tiniest little movement of the
set, puppet, background, camera, or lighting can destroy a whole sequence.
The slightest slip shows up when you play it all back.
Given this need for absolute stillness, production experienced a nightmare of their own early
in the shoot.
As animator Mike Belzer told D23, the first scene he animated for the movie was "What's
This?"
While he was working on the sequence in which Jack dances around a snowman, Belzer realized
as he went to move the skeleton puppet that it was shaking slightly.
Down the block, construction workers were pile-driving into the ground.
Belzer recalled,
"Each time they pounded the girder it shook the whole neighborhood.
I freaked out.
How can we make a stop motion film with this going on?"
He consulted Selick, who told him to take each frame once Jack had settled.
That worked, and the pile-driving stopped a week or two later.
Despite their best efforts, Belzer thinks that you can still spot a little bit of the
disaster in the final movie, saying,
"You may notice a little soft motion blur around some of the characters where perhaps
we didn't expose the frame at the right time."
Being a creative, old-school group, the crew on The Nightmare Before Christmas came up
with creative, classic approaches to various problems they ran into during production.
Filming Zero, Jack's loyal, orange-nosed, translucent ghost dog was a challenge all
its own.
Selick explained to Yahoo that Zero's face, nose, and head were made from the same foam
latex as the other puppets, but for his ghostly ears and body, they used flexible lead sheeting
covered with cloth tape.
To make it look like he was floating, they used the oldest trick in the illusion book.
The Zero puppet was animated off-screen using a beam splitter, which creates a reflection
that looks like a translucent figure.
Other ghosts required even more retro-feeling effects.
For the ghosts that fly in holding presents, the team built the presents and animated them
first using strings, then the effects team mapped out the ghosts' path onscreen frame
by frame, a process called rotoscoping.
They then drew the ghosts by hand, frame by frame, and the two clips were composited into
one seamless, ghostly scene.
Between pre-production, storyboarding, songwriting, animation and post-production, Nightmare took
about three and a half years to make, and took 120 people.
The actual stop-motion portion of filming took the animators 18 months.
Each second of screentime is broken into 24 frames.
Between each frame, the animator has to move their puppet a fraction of an inch, or change
the puppet's face, head, or eyes.
The team created as many as 400 heads for Jack alone to convey each expression, and
he had individual eyelid pieces which could be slipped in and out to make him blink or
close his eyes.
The team completed about one minute of film per week.
Selick says the scene that took the most time to shoot was "Poor Jack," which animator Anthony
Scott worked on for six months.
First of all, Selick told Yahoo, it's almost all filmed as a single shot, which means any
tiny continuity error can ruin a long chunk of sequence.
Second, the character goes through a lot of emotions in one scene, which all needed to
be shown on screen.
In a film this lovingly made, you expect attention to detail.
There are a few little Easter eggs you may not have spotted.
Walt Disney came up with Mickey Mouse in 1928, and he and his famous ears have been cameoing
in Disney properties ever since.
In The Nightmare Before Christmas, two of the children are chased by a horror version
of Mickey — and they have Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck prints on their pajamas.
Fans only recently learned about another hidden Mickey.
Animator Anthony Scott admitted, per D23, that while he was working on the scene in
Jack's lab, he snuck a tiny Mickey Mouse head from his mechanical pencil onto the workbench,
with Selick's permission.
Another famous moviemaker had his Easter egg cut.
The hockey-playing vampires' puck was originally Tim Burton's decapitated head.
A producer suggested Burton might not like it, and Selick replaced his head with a pumpkin.
Fortunately, another decapitated head still made its way into the final film: look for
Danny Elfman's dome inside the upright base of the Halloweentown Band.
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