An absolute cult classic, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas has been disgusting and delighting audiences since it first premiered in 1993, and has amassed quite the following over the years.
Practically synonymous with Halloween at this point (let’s not get into whether it’s a Christmas movie or not), The Nightmare Before Christmas is the go-to movie for many of us on foggy, winter days.
From the strapping Jack Skellington to the unnerving Dr Finkelstein, the residents of Halloween Town have become well-loved household names. Despite this eerie musical having been around for over 3 decades now (we’re sorry if that made you feel old, folks), it still has plenty of surprises up its sleeve.
So, if you’re keen to uncover the skeletons lurking in this movie’s closest, read on for some fun facts you never knew about The Nightmare Before Christmas.
The Real Director
source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/tommyc/3374952990/
If you ask most people who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, you’ll get the standard, “Tim Burton, of course!” — but this isn’t true. Although Burton’s name is above the title, he was the producer but not the director. It was actually Henry Selick who directed the movie, though very few people know this.
The Nightmare Before Christmas was Selick’s directorial debut and set him on a successful path to direct James & The Giant Peach (1996) and Coraline (2009), among others.
No-Eyed Jack
If you close your eyes and imagine Jack Skellington, you can picture his iconic grin and dark, empty sockets, right? But what if we told you that Jack came very close to having human eyes instead of vacant skull holes?
There was an ongoing debate between Disney and Tim Burton about the nature of Jack’s face. According to a report from Mouseplanet in 2018, Burton reveals, “The first rule of drawn animation is that you have to have eyes for expression. I thought it would be great to give life to these characters that have no eyes.” However, he added, “Disney really fought for us to give Jack these friendly eyes instead of dark holes but we wouldn’t budge.”
We wonder what Jack would have looked like if he had been given human eyes…
An Extensive Cast
For stop-motion animation, there sure are a lot of characters in The Nightmare Before Christmas. And each character had to be positioned extremely carefully due to the nature of the movie. To make things even more complicated, many characters wore masks or had removable or rotating faces as part of their costume (the animators certainly didn’t make their lives easy with this one). In total, there are 227 handmade puppet characters that feature in the movie, from the Mayor right down to Lock, Shock, and Barrel.
In order for the animators to convey emotion, each puppet also had multiple faces that were swapped out. Main character, Jack Skellington, actually had over 400 different heads in order to convey different facial expressions and movements. That’s an awful lot of little skeleton faces.
The Original Villain
We all know that the darkly comedic and charismatic Oogie Boogie is the villain in The Nightmare Before Christmas, from the start to the moment when his sack body unravels to reveal a maggoty mess. But, few people know what was supposed to be in place of the maggots. Want to hazard a guess?
The original ending of the movie suggested that Oogie Boogie’s sack-like body was stripped away to reveal none other than Dr. Finklestein! Enraged by jealousy on account of Sally spending too much time with Jack, Finklestein was supposed to have been the mastermind behind it all. However, this ending didn’t quite fit right, so, ultimately, it was scrapped.
The Movie Has Poetic Origins
By Harald Krichel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=151958850
As the movie’s iconic rhyming opening lines may give away, The Nightmare Before Christmas was actually based on a poem. “T’was a long time ago, longer now than it seems / In a place that perhaps you’ve seen in your dreams”… sound familiar?
Before Tim Burton was an animator for Disney, he wrote a poetic reimagining of the well-known traditional poem, A Visit from St. Nicholas: “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house / Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”.
Burton initially pitched this poem to Disney as a stop-motion movie way back in 1983, but it didn’t work at the time.
Painstaking Work
The production crew for the movie really had their work cut out for them as not only did they have to account for over 200 characters (each with multiple faces), but they filmed at 24 frames per second.
If, like us, you’re not familiar with stop motion animation lingo, this means that the animators had to pose each character a total of 24 times just for 1 second of footage. What a brain ache!
Mickey Mouse Makes an Appearance
It wouldn’t be a Disney movie without some kind of easter egg for the die-hard fans, right?
Depending on when you last watched the film, you might remember the scene where two human children wake up on Christmas morning only to be terrorized by some creepy toys straight from Halloween Town. Well, if you look a little closer at the children’s pajamas, you might see a few familiar faces. The children are wearing PJs with Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse on them!
There Are Two Jacks
Did you know that there are technically two different Jack Skellingtons in the film?
Ok, not really — but Jack Skellington was voiced by two different actors throughout the film.
The smooth-talking voice of Jack belongs to American actor Chris Sarandon. However, each time that Jack breaks into song, it’s actually singer-songwriter Danny Elfman’s voice that you’re hearing. Elfman had major involvement with the musical part of the movie and composed ten separate songs for the film, also voicing Barrel and the Clown with the Tear-Away Face.
A Jack of all Trades
Another interesting fact about Jack Skellington is that he’s had quite the covert acting career of his own beyond A Nightmare Before Christmas.
Over the years, observant Tim Burton fans and avid Disney watchers have noticed fleeting glimpses of the Pumpkin King popping up in all sorts of unexpected places. Just as Jack took a sneaky trip into Christmas Town, he’s also ventured outside of his main movie to feature in other Disney and Burton films.
Jack (or his likeness, at least) has been spotted in Coraline, Princess and the Frog, Alice in Wonderland, Finding Nemo, and Sleepy Hollow too. Whether it’s spotting a skeletal hand or spying a skull face in the background, if you needed an excuse to watch any of those films again, this is it.
Keep the Nightmares Coming with Displate
While the film may only be a little over an hour long, you can immerse yourself in the whimsical world of Tim Burton for as long as you like with Displate. Our The Nightmare Before Christmas-inspired metal poster designs feature all your favorite scenes and characters — from Oogie Boogie to Sally and Zero — so you never have to leave Halloween Town.
Perfect for movie rooms, bedrooms, gaming areas, or living rooms, our metal posters let you decorate your space exactly how you want. Choose your favorite design and decorate your walls with a splash of terror to keep the nightmares coming!
For more movie trivia and design inspiration, be sure to keep up with the Displate blog.
