Which The Nightmare Before Christmas Character Are You?

Learn More About The Nightmare Before Christmas

Released in October 1993, The Nightmare Before Christmas began as a poem Tim Burton wrote in the early 1980s while working as an animator at Disney. The studio passed on it at the time. A decade later, with Burton established as a bankable director, Disney revived the project — though the company was nervous enough about its tone that it released the film under the Touchstone Pictures banner rather than the Disney name. That hesitation looks almost funny now, given how thoroughly the film has been absorbed into Disney's identity.

One persistent misconception is worth clearing up: Burton did not direct it. He produced the film and created the story and characters, but the director was Henry Selick, a stop-motion specialist who went on to make Coraline. The distinction matters, because the painstaking craft on screen — roughly 110,000 individual frames, each posed by hand, with Jack Skellington alone requiring several hundred interchangeable heads to produce his expressions — is Selick's team's achievement. Three years of work produced about 76 minutes of film.

The story follows Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King of Halloween Town, who has grown weary of scaring people year after year. Wandering into the woods, he stumbles through a door into Christmas Town and falls instantly in love with it. His solution is to take over the holiday entirely — an idea that goes about as badly as you would expect. Sally, a stitched-together ragdoll who can see the disaster coming, tries to stop him; the Mayor panics; Oogie Boogie takes advantage of the chaos; and Dr. Finkelstein keeps trying to keep Sally locked up.

Danny Elfman's score is doing an extraordinary amount of the work. He wrote ten songs for the film and also provided Jack's singing voice, and the result is closer to a stage musical than a typical animated feature — which is presumably why the film has been adapted into live concert performances and a long-running Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay at Disneyland. Songs like What's This? and Sally's Song do more character work in two minutes than most scripts manage in twenty.

The film's commercial life has been genuinely strange. It was a modest performer in 1993, earning respectable but unspectacular returns. Its real success came later, through merchandise, Hot Topic, and a fandom that adopted Jack and Sally as icons well beyond the movie itself. By the 2000s the characters were everywhere — on clothing, tattoos, theme park attractions — and annual re-releases in 3D kept it in theaters. It is one of the clearest examples in modern film of an audience deciding, long after the fact, that something is a classic.

There is also the enduring and completely unresolvable argument about whether it is a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie. The honest answer is that it is structurally both: it opens on Halloween, climaxes on Christmas Eve, and its whole thematic engine is the collision between the two. This is a feature, not a bug — it gives the film a two-month viewing window that almost no other title enjoys.

If you like this particular corner of gothic animation, Selick's Addams Family cousins in tone are worth exploring, and our Wednesday quiz covers the modern teen-goth version of the same sensibility. For more spooky-season viewing that stays firmly on the fun side of frightening, our Practical Magic character quiz is a natural next stop.

So which resident of Halloween Town are you — the restless visionary, the quiet realist, the troublemaker, the anxious organizer, or the inventor who cannot let go? Take the quiz above and find out.