Danny Elfman on composing ‘Nightmare Before Christmas’ and working with Tim Burton: ‘I never know how he’s going to react to a piece of music’
Danny Elfman doesn’t have an answer for what made The Nightmare Before Christmas such a holiday-season staple years after its premiere. But he’s perfectly fine being in the dark about it.
“What makes anything become culturally significant and other things not is, to me, one of the great mysteries of the universe,” Elfman tells Gold Derby with a laugh. “So I’m just glad that I worked on this one, which developed a second life, and that life became such a bigger thing from when the movie was released 32 years ago.”
More than three decades later, Nightmare and Elfman’s “This is Halloween” remains one of the most recognizable songs in Elfman’s iconic canon, which also includes the likes of Beetlejuice, Batman Returns, and Edward Scissorhands, along with tunes like “Dead Man’s Party” from his band Oingo Boingo. In fact, the musician just wrapped his annual sold-out Nightmare concert performances at the Hollywood Bowl, backed by an all-star cast.
But Nightmare was Elfman’s first time composing for an animated movie, and, as he recounts, involved “intensive” work between himself and Burton, who created the story and characters in the Henry Selick-directed movie, while Elfman “learned how an animated film works.”
“I worked super, super hard on it. As a composer, we’re usually on a movie for about three months, and I worked on this film for over two years,” Elfman recalls of Nightmare, which follows skeleton Jack as he attempts to redefine himself with some misguided (albeit well-intentioned) holiday cheer. “So I was really invested in it, not to mention the character of Jack.”
Danny ElfmanPhoto by Medios y Media/Getty Images
But getting it accepted by the masses was another story. Following a “preview for kids that went terribly,” Nightmare was released by Touchstone, a former Walt Disney Studios subsidiary.
As Elfman remembers asking journalists during a press junket in Orlando for Nightmare’s release, “‘Are your kids scared of Halloween?’ And they said, ‘No.’ Then I said, ‘This movie’s not too scary for them.’ And then they would say stuff like, ‘But Santa Claus gets tortured, doesn’t he?’ And I told them, ‘He doesn’t get tortured. He’s inconvenienced.’“
Nightmare clearly found its audience over the years, though, even inspiring a nearly annual concert at L.A.’s iconic Hollywood Bowl with performances from Elfman and other stars — up until last year including Ken Page, who died in September 2024 at age 70. This year, villain Oogie Boogie’s song was sung by Keith David, whom Elfman tells Gold Derby was, understandably, under “a lot of pressure” in Page’s absence, but “did a marvelous job.”
“It was really difficult shoes to fill,” Elfman says of David whose Disney-villain credits also include Dr. Facilier in 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. “I think [Keith] might’ve been a little nervous Saturday, his first time ever doing it, but Sunday, the second time, I think he just settled right in. And I think he did great.”
Luckily for fans of Nightmare, more spine-tingling holiday cheer is afoot with A Danny Elfman Christmas Story, a newly released animated short written and narrated by Elfman and described as “a playful, gothic holiday tale inspired by Edward Gorey,” with animation by Peter Carsillo (Universal’s Epic Universe) and editing and VFX by Jon Mann-Krieger.
The inspiration for A Danny Elfman Christmas Story, the composer tells Gold Derby, came about a year ago when he was brainstorming “something fun to put on Instagram” and his assistant asked, “‘Why don’t you read a story?’” since fans “‘love [his] voice.’ “
“She sent me The Doubtful Guest by Edward Gorey, because I’m a huge fan; he was a big influence on me. And as I was reading it, I was saying, ‘These Edward Gorey pieces are so fun to read, but without the illustrations, it doesn’t feel right,’ “ Elfman says. ”I knew that trying to get the rights and going to the estate and all that was going to be too hard. So I wrote my own.”
Though Burton was not involved in A Danny Elfman Christmas Story, Elfman has collaborated with him on 18 projects over the last 40 years, beginning with Burton’s 1985 directorial debut Pee-wee’s Big Adventure and most recently on the 2024 sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.
“The best part of working with Tim is just the material he gives me, which has allowed me to do some of my best work,” Elfman says. “They’re big, wild canvases to be able to run around in.”
Of “the most challenging part,” the composer admits Burton “is still very unpredictable,” explaining, “Of all the directors I work with, I never know how he’s going to react to a piece of music. So I’m still nervous when I play music for him the first time, because he’s just a really interesting, unusual human being. And I never try to second guess [whether], ‘Oh, Tim’s gonna love this.’“
As for his own family’s love for Nightmare, Elfman says his two older grandchildren are all about it (and Halloween in general!), but the youngest — Owen, who’s 2 1/2 — might need “another year or so” to “get into the spirit” of the spooky season.
“Owen did come with my daughter Mali to see some of the [Hollywood Bowl concert] rehearsal with his earmuffs on, to protect his ears,” the composer tells Gold Derby. “So he got to see Grandpa on stage singing, and God knows what he thought. He just looked really perplexed.”
And while this Halloween will be a little different than usual for Elfman considering he’ll be on a plane to visit his son Oliver in Japan, his pumpkin-king mentality contains multitudes and is not defined by a single date or location, as “Halloween is my night.”
“This’ll be a rare thing, to be in the air on Halloween,” he says. “But to me, this whole week is Halloween. Last week was Halloween, and next week is Halloween.”
‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’Buena Vista Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
What’s next in his career? Elfman has a new solo album coming out next year — and there might even be more A Danny Elfman Christmas Story installments in the future, though he can’t promise. But fans definitely shouldn’t get their hopes up for now about a potential Nightmare sequel, or even a reunion of the long-disbanded Oingo Bongo.
“I’m one of the people that [thinks] the past should remain the past,” Elfman says. “For me, it’s all about moving forward to new stuff. … And I got plenty to keep me busy.”
