A Closer Look At “This Is Halloween”
The Movie, The Covers, The Online Culture
In 1993, “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas” was released.
This movie was not directed by Tim Burton and is not about Christmas.
Whereas the first half of this statement might be surprising but uncontroversial, the second half is guaranteed to lead to heated debate in the comments section.
(I heard controversy drives engagement and will make me rich. And isn’t that what writing is all about?)
But I digress.
And regardless of where you stand on the “Halloween movie or Christmas movie?” question, we can all come together in admiring the soundtrack — one song, in particular, has taken on a life of its own, transcending the limits of the movie to find a new home in spooky playlists, Warrior Cats fan art and everything in-between.
Let’s go on a scary ride!
“This Is Halloween” was written by Danny Elfman and released a total of four times in three different versions across three different official soundtracks.
If that sounds confusing, it’s because it is.
To start with, there are actually two different official soundtracks to “Nightmare Before Christmas” — the original one from 1993, on which the song is performed by The Citizens Of Halloween (i.e., the original voices from the movie) and a 2006 reissue. The latter features a bonus disc including two covers of the song — one by Panic! At The Disco, the other by Marilyn Manson.
In addition to those two versions of the soundtrack, there is also a remix album called “Nightmare Revisited,” which for some reason contains the Marilyn Manson version from 2006 again.
Why they would decide not to commission a new version of the movie’s most iconic song for their remix album is beyond me, but in either case, we have these three “canonical” versions of This Is Halloween:
Now that we’ve established the three main versions of the song — are you ready to get obscure?
I don’t want this to turn into a whole “subs vs. dubs” thing (shoutout to my fellow anime fans out there!), but in this particular case, I’m glad the movie was dubbed for various foreign language markets because it gave us German, French, Japanese and many other versions of the song.
To close out this little overview, I would like to look at YouTube and the various places the song has popped up in recent years, often completely removed from the movie’s original context. The first example is “spooky music mixes/playlists.” There are tons of those compilations out there, and they’re really perfect for getting you into a pleasantly spooky mood. Here’s one of many examples:
The second context in which “This Is Halloween” has found a new home online is as a musical accompaniment to various AMVs (anime music videos), an amazingly creative form of online fan art that would probably deserve its own article at some point.
Fans edit scenes from their favorite show(s) and set it to music — as can be seen here:
The final example is this Warrior Cats MAP (multiple animator project), standing in for the many MAP creators who have found that “This Is Halloween” provides an excellent background to their spooky fan projects:
And that concludes my overview. I hope you enjoyed this story! If you would like to read my closer look at “Spooky Scary Skeletons,” you can do so here:
And here’s a Halloween playlist by Kirby Workes that I recently enjoyed reading about:
