Three decades ago, a gang of outsiders created an offbeat adventure that, appropriately, didn't fit in. Yet as TIM BURTON and his ConoRts tell us, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS' ever-increasing Popularity has Surprised even them...
They sell Jack Skellington hoodies at Primark. Baggy pyjamas. Fake-fur slippers. A whole lot of affordable casual clothing with his big, white, eyeless face on it. Go up the escalator and it’s just there. Meanwhile, in the run-up to Halloween at Sainsbury’s recently, you could impulse-buy Jack plastic pumpkins and fiv-efoot-tall Sally dolls while doing your groceries. In Sainsbury’s. An aisle along from the salmon.
“Yeah, that is weird,” says Tim Burton. Indeed, the high-street takeover of The Nightmare Before Christmas is… unexpected. It’s everywhere. “I know, I find that weird too,” continues Burton. “But I love it, it’s surreal. I feel like I’m in a weird alternative universe.” He probably means ‘alternate’. Or does he? ‘Alternative’ fits.
Either way, this is different from how things seemed when it was released in 1993, when it did middling business at the box office, distributed by a studio that didn’t quite know what they had or what to do with it. Today, the film is an industry in itself. “That’s the thing, right?” says Burton, sitting at home in London in front of a wall of collectible toys and action figures. “You can argue and you can predict and whatever, but there’s something here that defies anybody’s description.”
The Nightmare Before Christmas was not standard Disney animated fare. There were no cutesy characters, no fuzzy sidekicks, unless you count a dead dog. Songs, yes, but they were about kidnapping Santa Claus, sticking him in a boiling pot and cooking him. The bad guy, Oogie Boogie, is a monster apparently made of cloth but actually made of bugs. There are ripped-off limbs and torn-away faces. Forlorn, romantic and mischievous, it was a very personal passion project for Burton, director Henry Selick, composer Danny Elfman and screenwriter Caroline Thompson, who all poured themselves, their hopes, dreams, fantasies, insecurities into it — but its enduring success is a curveball.
“They were selling 13-foot-tall Jack Skellingtons in Home Depot this year,” remarks Selick, also at home (in California), also against a backdrop of figurines — ones from his own stop-motion work (including Jack on his sled with his skeleton reindeer, alongside the likes of James And The Giant Peach’s Miss Spider and, of course, Coraline). Selick
