Dan­ny Elf­man: How The Night­mare Before Christ­mas restored my hol­i­day spirit

Dan­ny Elf­man was nev­er a fan of Christ­mas. Grow­ing up Jew­ish in a very non-Jew­ish part of Los Ange­les, his Decem­bers were a far cry from the sea­son­al fun glimpsed in movies, TV and even his own neigh­bour­hood. Instead, Christ­mas was a time of iso­la­tion and exclu­sion for this bud­ding musi­cal mae­stro, and as he grew so did his ani­mos­i­ty for all things festive.

Then, in 1993, every­thing changed. ​“It’s kind of iron­ic,” Elf­man says. ​“Christ­mas was a ter­ri­ble time for me and I dread­ed it com­ing each year. It was a peri­od of real alien­ation. I imag­ined all my friends hold­ing hands around trees, singing songs togeth­er lov­ing­ly with their fam­i­lies and I would just be look­ing for some­thing to do. Now here I am asso­ci­at­ed with it… It’s odd.”

Elfman’s unlike­ly link to Christ­mas came via his friend and long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor Tim Bur­ton. Back in the ear­ly ​’90s, the Bat­man direc­tor was pro­duc­ing The Night­mare Before Christ­mas, a dark rework­ing of ​‘Twas The Night Before Christ­mas’ chron­i­cling Hal­loween­town hero Jack Skellington’s quest to under­stand the sea­son of good­will. Stop-motion mas­ter Hen­ry Selick was tasked with bring­ing Burton’s sto­ry to life through a mam­moth ani­ma­tion process that would ulti­mate­ly break new ground – but it was the Elfman’s ear­worm sound­track that ele­vat­ed the film to icon­ic status.

It’s a suc­cess sto­ry as unlike­ly as the composer’s new­found appre­ci­a­tion for San­ta, and it was all pure­ly acci­den­tal. ​“The fun­ny thing about Tim and I start­ing The Night­mare Before Christ­mas is that nei­ther of us had any idea how to do a musi­cal ani­mat­ed film,” admits Elf­man. ​“When Tim brought me in there was no script, so we start­ed telling the sto­ry with songs and the script came after­wards – we did it all back­wards, but it made sense to us.”

With a blank can­vas to play with, Elf­man and Bur­ton fum­bled their way through, using reg­u­lar meet­ings to track Jack’s jour­ney from Hal­loween­town to Christ­mas­town and beyond. ​“Tim would just start telling me the sto­ry,” recalls Elf­man. ​“He’d show me all these great draw­ings and as he would describe the scene I’d start to hear the song. It was real­ly quick and sim­ple. He pro­vid­ed all the imagery I need­ed to get inspired.”

As the film took shape, so did a col­lab­o­ra­tive writ­ing process unlike any­thing Elf­man had expe­ri­enced before. Burton’s cre­ativ­i­ty seeped into Jack’s words and the pair’s mutu­al inspi­ra­tions rose to the sur­face. ​“Tim had phras­es and lines and they were all real­ly good,” Elf­man says. ​“He’d write things like, ​‘Per­haps it’s the head that I found in the lake?’, and I’d be like, ​‘Oh, that’s a good one!’, and I’d incor­po­rate it into the song. Our lyri­cal styles come from some­where between Edward Gorey and Dr Seuss. We both grew up on the same stuff so it was easy for us to fall into that same rhythm. I want­ed the songs to feel like they could have been writ­ten in any era. I’ve nev­er writ­ten so quick­ly since.”

With writ­ing com­plete, it soon came time to record and hand their work over to Selick’s ani­ma­tion team. At the time, Elf­man was liv­ing with then-girl­friend and screen­writer Car­o­line Thomp­son who, hav­ing spent weeks lis­ten­ing to Bur­ton and her boyfriend detail Jack’s plans to steal Christ­mas, proved an obvi­ous choice for pen­ning the script. ​“Car­o­line was lis­ten­ing to all these songs and going crazy. She was like, ​‘Hel­lo, I’m right here!’ She was ready to go. I was lit­er­al­ly writ­ing in her garage – I made a lit­tle makeshift stu­dio in the back of the house, then Tim and I went into a record­ing stu­dio one night and laid down the voic­es for all parts apart from Sally.

“After that, I start­ed going up and meet­ing Hen­ry,” Elf­man con­tin­ues. ​“I went up every month for about a year-and-a-half and we slow­ly got a small group of voice actors togeth­er and laid down the per­ma­nent voic­es, then I went into the stu­dio with Tim to record my vocals. It’s fun­ny, I’d be record­ing and Tim would say, ​‘Could we just hear the orig­i­nal demo?’ and he’d like that bet­ter. There’s a les­son to be learned there which I should have known by then and that’s some­times you real­ly can’t beat your first take. At least half of Jack’s final vocals came from those first demos.”

By craft­ing Jack’s dia­logue and lend­ing him a singing voice, Elf­man felt an unex­pect­ed kin­ship with Burton’s pin­stripe hero and his urge to escape. ​“I total­ly got Jack,” he reflects. ​“I was the lead singer for a rock band and I real­ly want­ed out but had this sense of respon­si­bil­i­ty and just couldn’t leave. When you’re the leader of a band it’s like you are The Pump­kin King. You’re the leader of your own lit­tle micro­verse and I total­ly got his desire of, ​‘I’m not hap­py any­more and I don’t know what I want to do but I need some­thing’. When I was writ­ing for Jack, I was also writ­ing for myself. I was singing him almost semi-auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal­ly. I inject­ed a lot of myself in there and it made it more personal.”

The only restric­tion the duo placed upon them­selves was to avoid a con­tem­po­rary Broad­way or Dis­ney musi­cal sound, yet this only added to the studio’s con­fu­sion over the fin­ished prod­uct. ​“Dis­ney had an ear­ly pre­view for kids and they just didn’t know what the hell it was,” remem­bers Elf­man. ​“They were expect­ing The Lit­tle Mer­maid and they got The Night­mare Before Christ­mas – but Tim and I knew that it was fine for kids.”

After a luke­warm ini­tial recep­tion, Burton’s pas­sion project went unno­ticed for more than a decade; it wasn’t until a pro­mo­tion­al trip to Tokyo for 2005’s Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry that the pair became aware of the film’s cult fan­base. ​“Tim and I would go shop­ping in Tokyo toy stores and all these char­ac­ters were every­where. There was even a club ded­i­cat­ed to The Night­mare Before Christ­mas. It had not fad­ed away.”

Anoth­er clue? Cov­er song requests from well known artists. ​“I was like, ​‘Mar­i­lyn Manson’s cov­er­ing that? Wow!’,” laughs Elf­man. ​“I once got a call from Korn’s Jonathan Davis who said, ​‘You don’t know me but I’m a big fan of The Night­mare Before Christ­mas and I hear you col­lect shrunk­en heads’. He actu­al­ly turned me on to a col­lec­tor who I got quite a few objects from.” Not long after that, Dis­ney final­ly began to embrace the film’s unde­ni­able appeal, wel­com­ing it into The House of Mouse and for­ev­er redefin­ing Elfman’s rela­tion­ship with Christmas.

“Some­where between Jack Skelling­ton and the Grinch is where you find Dan­ny Elf­man as a child,” the com­pos­er smiles. ​“It’s amaz­ing to me. I’ve nev­er worked hard­er on a movie, so for it to be alive and thriv­ing 25 years lat­er is astound­ing. How many films get a sec­ond life? If I’ve done 105 movies, 60 of them have suf­fered a sim­i­lar ear­ly demise so If I could pick just one to con­tin­ue, it would have been this.”