How ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ Helped Helped Take Halloween Worldwide
Film director and writer Tim Burton used to joke that when it came to composer Danny Elfman’s 80s new wave band, Oingo Boingo, “all his shows were very Halloween-based”. It’s fitting, then, that together the pair would create one of the most influential works of pop culture ever, The Nightmare Before Christmas.
Burton and Elfman shared a love of that costume-heavy festival and by the time the former decided to pitch an animated Christmas film to Walt Disney Studios in the early 90s, he had decided that it would have a distinct Halloween theme.
The director once explained that he had grown up in Burbank, California, where the sunny weather hardly changed. One way residents could tell the seasonal changes, he recalled, was by the holiday decorations, and a lot of the town’s stores used to blend Halloween and Christmas to capitalise on sales well before 31 October each year. Burton said this planted the seed for his tale of the King Of Halloween intruding on Christmas. He sensed that a similarly canny creative hijacking would pay dividends in a musical movie.
“A kind of cult life”
Elfman, who wrote the music and lyrics for the The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, also lent his singing voice to Jack Skellington (otherwise voiced by Chris Sarandon) and had a cameo as the red-headed corpse in the double bass of the Halloween Town Band in the Oscar-nominated film. “I think of it more as a Halloween movie, but it really is about Christmas,” says Elfman. “Regardless, it’s just that weird thing that sometimes happens where a film continues a kind of cult life after it comes out.”
The movie gained an extraordinary following and the sinister characters and gleefully macabre songs helped make Halloween a much bigger global event than it had been before. Elfman said that he and Burton both agreed that the tracks should not feel like pop songs: “We felt these songs should try to find a kind of timeless place that’s not contemporary. My influences were going from Kurt Weill to Gilbert And Sullivan to early Rodgers And Hammerstein.”
There were some jazz influences, too. Elfman said that he had taught himself to write music by transcribing Duke Ellington, and there is more than a touch of the Jazz Age in ‘Oogie Boogie’s Song’, which was performed by actor Ken Page. Page, who had previously starred in a Broadway adaptation of the musical Ain’t Misbehavin’, brought his own bold approach to the track. “I told them my take on Oogie Boogie’s voice would be somewhere between Bert Lahr [the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz] and the voice of the demon in The Exorcist, and along with that came Cab Calloway and Fats Waller stuff for the singing.”
This is Halloween
Oingo Boingo guitarist Steve Bartek helped oversee the orchestration on the soundtrack and was pleased with the way they brought out the best from a multitude of vocal performers. Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman), who voiced the trick-or-treater character Lock, sings on ‘Kidnap The Sandy Claws’, along with Canadian actress Catherine O’Hara. The latter also delivers a sweetly sinister version of ‘Sally’s Song’ — accompanied by accordion and violins — as she sings the lines, “Can’t shake this feeling that I have/The worst is just around the bend.”
Other highlights include the songs ‘This Is Halloween’, ‘Jack’s Lament’ and ‘What’s This?’ on an soundtrack full of strong melodies and lyrics bursting with striking imagery. The The Nightmare Before Christmas album is bookended by an introduction and conclusion narrated in typically extravagant style by Patrick Stewart. The soundtrack was nominated for the 1993 Golden Globe for Best Original Score and reached the Billboard Top 100 albums chart.
A part of modern Christmas festivities
If there were any qualms around releasing such a ghoulish take on Christmas, they were to prove unfounded. Within a few years of The Nightmare Before Christmas’ release, both the film and music had gained an enormous following. In 2006, an updated soundtrack was issued, which included bonus tracks such as a version of ‘Sally’s Song’ by Fiona Apple, Marilyn Manson singing ‘This Is Halloween’ and a guest appearance by Fall Out Boy.
Fall Out Boy’s bassist, Pete Wentz, said: “Disney approached our management about us doing a song and we’re obsessed with that film and Danny Elfman. And of course I’ve got my Nightmare tattoos, so we were like, ‘Yes!’ The songs in the film are pretty much the best things ever. They’re Elfman at his prime.”
The ingenious stop-motion film took three years to make and is hailed as a modern classic. And much of that is down to the wonderful soundtrack, which turned 25 years old in October 2018, and which helped make Halloween songs a part of modern Christmas festivities.
The The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack can be bought here.
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Originally published at www.udiscovermusic.com on October 31, 2018.
